Practical Magic and Other Lies That People Tell
by Eatsscissors
Summary: The only thing that kept the demon coming when he was six months old was the influence of the Charmed Ones. They're not around anymore. Crossover with Supernatural, genfic with a dash of DeanPiper thrown in.
1. Chapter 1

TITLE: Practical Magic and Other Lies that People Tell

AUTHOR: Mari

SPOILERS: Through 'Devil's Trap' for SPN and 'Kill Billie Vol. 2' for Charmed. AU for both shows afterwards so, yes, Phoebe and Paige are still dead and Piper is the only Charmed One left standing.

PAIRING: Mostly gen, though the heavy amounts of Dean/Piper subtext are very much intentional.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I'm not really a Charmed writer, and I will readily admit that my knowledge of canon is spotty. Mostly I watched the last season and then caught up as frantically as I could through Netflix and reruns. As Charmed couldn't seem to keep its own canon straight a lot of the time, especially in the final seasons, I resorted to just throwing my hands up in the air and going with the most palatable option nine times out of ten. As such, if you notice canon errors on the Charmed side (except in response to Wyatt's ever-growing retinue of powers, where it's deliberate), please feel free to bring them to my attention and over concrit in general.

Part One

Dean woke up with a pounding head, several broken bones on his right side, and the knowledge that he was now both an orphan and an only child.

After that, realizing that he was handcuffed to his hospital bed was almost anticlimactic.

---

Suspected murderers were not supposed to come back from the dead, Dean learned when he was finally weaned off of the painkillers enough to appreciate the handcuff situation and the fact that he had tubes running out of more orifices than he cared to think about. It caused quite a stir when they managed it. Dean had been carrying so many sets of fake identification with him that, as he had been brought to the hospital from the scene of a probable crime, his prints had finally been run just to see what would happen.

It would be a sad day for the universe when it finally ran out of ways to fuck him over, Dean thought. He tugged restlessly at the chain on his handcuff as yet another cop-he had lost track of how many he had already seen, and he strongly suspected that there were still more while he was unconscious-sat by his bedside and peppered him with the same questions that he had been hearing for days. Who is he? Where is he from? How is it possible that his photo and fingerprints match those of a killer buried in a pauper's grave hundreds of miles away?

'Make this make sense to me,' the cops eyes told him. 'We're not sure what we can hold you on, not really, but by God we'll keep inventing things until you show us how to set the world right again.' He didn't seem like a bad man, or a cruel one. He probably went to his kids' Little League games, volunteered at his church, and drank too much beer on the weekends. Dean almost felt sorry for him.

Almost. Dean's father and brother were dead, and it turned out that it was a hard old world all around. He was not in the mood to make it easy on anyone else just yet.

Dean continued to rattle at the chain on the handcuffs, wishing to God that his other arm was not encased in plaster up to the shoulder and that he could hit the button that discharged more morphine. His knitting bones were an agony that began with his ribs and spread outwards in a slowly-growing nova. He played dumb, sticking to the ID that was going to send up the least number of red flags in the checks that the cops have doubtless run on all of them by now and doing everything that he could to disavow the rest with good ol' boy charm. It worked about as well on this cop as it had on all of his buddies before him.

When the nurse finally arrived to give him his medication for the pain, it was all that Dean could do not to leap up from the bed and kiss her. "Angie," he declared broadly as he watched her inject the precious morphine into his IV, "I always knew that you were my favorite."

She said, "My name is Beth."

Dean almost thought that it would easier if he were to dream whenever the medication took him under, but he didn't.

---

When Beth was late with one of his miracle shots two days later, causing Dean to tell the latest in a long line of detectives where he could shove his badge if he was feeling so inclined, the police decided that the combination of the fake IDs and the fact that Dean was being less than cooperative were enough to keep him in custody, after all. Dean heard whispers of the body of his imposter being exhumed and still looking exactly like him, so that the police cannot even draw comfort from a bait and switch.

This was the first time in his life that Dean has ever remained in the hospital for the full amount of time recommended by his doctors, and without even having to use a scammed credit card in order to pay for it. This almost made Dean feel bad for what happened next.

Most of his right arm was still encased in plaster from the hospital and towards the police car waiting outside. There was a thunking noise as Dean swung it around and into the face of the officer on his right; the cracking sound that follows is that of the man's nose breaking. Bones that had hardly even begun to heal were jarred more than he liked and Dean gritted his teeth hard, thought for a moment that he tasted enamel on his tongue, but it was a pale shadow of what he had felt immediately after waking up. The second man was lying unconscious on the ground before he even had time to draw his gun.

Dean wondered if the fact that he did not kill the cop even though he was supposed to be a murderer would earn him any points. Probably not.

He had no car, no money, and none of his weaponry or IDs, so Dean stole a car and headed for the only place that he could think of. He didn't have a home, but he still had somewhere that would take him in. Dean was not sure if it was this realization or the fact that he was separated from Beth and her gifts too soon, but he had to pull the car over to the side of the road and be sick more than once.

Missouri was waiting for him on her front porch when Dean pulled the third in a string of stolen vehicles to a halt in front of her house and cut the engine. He exited cautiously, half from pain and half because he was not sure what kind of welcome he could really expect. When Missouri instead hugged him hard enough to make his cracked ribs throb, Dean felt as if all of the screws in his body had been simultaneously loosened by a half-turn. He leaned against her, lowering his face against her hair for a moment, and sighed.

"Oh, sugar," Missouri said, rubbing small circles against his back. "Oh, sweetheart, I am so sorry." For a moment, her pity was so strong that it cut, and it was all that Dean could not to break contact and step away from her. A second later, he realized that she probably felt the both of them die the very second that it happened.

"Not exactly, but near enough," Missouri said, leaning back after giving his injured arm a final, affectionate squeeze that he couldn't feel through the plaster. Then she glanced over his shoulder, and her eyes narrowed. Dean received a ringing smack to the back of his head as she exclaimed, "Boy, get that car out of here, do you think that I need the law brought down on my head?"

---

Once Dean had taken the stolen car far enough away to meet with her satisfaction and returned again, Missouri made him coffee, saying, "I knew as soon as I felt you coming that the two of us were going to be in for a long night." She also set out a sandwich for him and a bottle of aspirin, the cap already pulled off so that he would not have to struggle in order to manage it one-handed.

Dean had not thought that he could possibly be hungry ever again, but at the mere sight of food that did not belong to the gelatin family or come served on a cheap plastic tray, his appetite returned with a vengeance. Dean had the sandwich devoured within four ravenous bites, saying, "Oh, my God, you don't know how bad hospital food is until you don't have to eat it any longer. It's like breaking out of the Matrix."

"Don't talk with your mouth full, I didn't make it for you so that you could spray crumbs all over my table," Missouri answered immediately. She had taken a seat across from dean and was not eating herself, only cradling a cup of coffee between her palms. "And while we're here, I'm flattered that you came to see me, but think we both know that it's not just because you enjoy my company."

Dean shook his head and reached for the aspirin. He took four of them along with a swallow of coffee hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth, ignoring Missouri's arched eyebrow as she noted the amount, before he said, "You said that you could feel it when Dad and Sam died?"

"I said near enough." Missouri has by now given up any pretense of drinking her coffee and was sitting with her hands folded in front of her cup, watching Dean intently. The idea that she might know that he was going to say even before he did was not one of the comforting ones that Dean had ever had.

"No," Missouri said softly in response, earning herself a weary look. "It doesn't work quite like that. But then, I don't exactly need any kind of special gifts in order to know what you're going to ask me, do I?"

"My father came to you once," Dean said, "because he was looking for the truth."

"He did," Missouri confirmed, and sighed. "You know, even when he was a baby, I could see that Sam and your daddy were going to butt heads. Cut from the very same cookie-cutter, those two, and made of stubborn than they were anything else. You were always your mother's child." Off of Dean's look, she added, "No, I never met her. I saw her through your daddy's mind, and through yours the one time that he brought you and Sam to see me. Bet you don't remember that, do you? But Mary would have moved heaven and earth to protect her family."

"Hate to interrupt the stroll down memory lane," Dean broke in brusquely. He noticed that he was clenching Missouri's coffee cup so tightly that he was in danger of shattering it and sending shards of china flying all over the table. Missouri saw, but for once she did not scold him. "But I don't have a whole lot of family left to protect."

Missouri sighed from somewhere deep enough within her chest to sound as if it hurt her. "You're daddy was a damned good man," she said, "and I'm not about to tell you any differently, but you listen to me, Dean, and you listen to me good. For your own sake, you just keep right on being your mother's child for as long as you can manage." When Dean only continued to look at her, she sighed and said, "It'll head west, for the coast. There's something big that's been building up steam down there for months, and it's just now getting ready to boil over."

"Thank you." Dean nodded stiffly and then stared down at the remaining coffee in his cup, now tepid and unappetizing. He wondered if all of his emotions were being broadcast as loudly as he felt they must be. The dim even within his own head was so strong that he could barely force his thoughts to remain in a straight line.

"Like an open wound," Missouri answered for him. Dean really wished that she would stop doing that. "I'm not going looking for it-what kind of manners do you think that I have? I don't have to. You're telling everyone with even the slightest bit of the sight everything that they want to know." Missouri had long since finished off her own coffee while Dean was toying with his. She pushed the cup away from herself as she leaned back in her chair and stared at Dean through solemn, concerned eyes. "You need to put a bandage over that. Lord knows I'm not telling you to shut it off entirely, because I don't think that would be good for you even if you could, but if you walk out onto a battlefield on the verge of falling apart like you are right now, then you are going to get eaten alive. Yours is not the first family that this demon has taken, and it's not going to be the last-"

"Yes it is," Dean promised her. He might have been his mother's son, but he was pretty sure that it was his father's voice that came rolling out of his mouth.

"Then you had better get yourself ready," Missouri told him, "because right now you are not."

End Part One


	2. Chapter 2

Part Two

The cast had been pried off of Dean's right arm hardly a month before, and his arm still felt a little strange, like all of the commands that he was giving his fingers were taking an extra half-second to be relayed from elbow to wrist. He flexed his hand into a fist frequently and forced himself to use the arm as much as he could in order to build the muscle back up. The last thing that he needed was for his strength to fail in a crucial moment.

'The West coast' was not a very big lead to go on, but it was the best that Missouri was able to give him based upon whatever oogie-boogie wavelength that she was tapped into. Dean wondered if she was able to be more specific with his father when he came to visit her over twenty years before, or if he was sent to wander the wilderness with the same load of burdens and doubts.

Thinking of this, two weeks before he had stopped by a drugstore and bought a notebook with a heavy spiral spine that could take a lot of abuse. His mother's child, Dean thought ruefully, even a bit wistfully. If only.

It did not take Dean long to find the likely focal point for this fight that Missouri could feel brewing, in bright San Francisco rather than an out of the way town with nothing better to do than wait for an apocalypse. He found an enormous newspaper article detailing how one of the oldest homes in the city had exploded without warning one night the previous May, erupting into flames that had had lit a half-dozen other homes on fire and burned two of them entirely to the ground before firefighters were able to put them out. The mention of flames piqued Dean's interest, and he thought that his heart actually stopped in his chest for a moment when he read that three women died inside. Though he scanned quickly through the article and found that one of the women had been married only a few weeks before, none of them had children.

Dean leaned back in his chair and shoved the newspaper away from himself in disgust. "Back to square one," he muttered, rubbing his hand over his face and feeling stubble rasping against the palm of his hand. Sam would probably have been able to find out everything about these women from their shoes sizes to how many fillings each one had in her teeth within thirty minutes, but Dean was not Sam. He did not like this line of thought, anyway, and shut it off before it could go too far.

Two of the women were sisters, Dean read on when he finally cracked and pulled the paper back towards himself. They were survived by a third, as well as her husband and children. There was a picture of a pretty brunette, a blond man, and two small boys accompanying the article. The older boy looked like his father. Even though he probably could not even walk yet, Dean could tell at a glance that the younger one was going to grow up to be his mother's son.

"Piper," Dean muttered to himself as he read the caption beneath the photo. "Wyatt, Chris, Leo." The perfect family. Well, until their house blew up. "I know the feeling," Dean whispered to the picture before he cleared his throat and trailed his finger down the page until he found an address. "Bingo."

Dean gave the librarian a smile as he left, the kind moderated with just the right amount of charm. Too little, and he would stand out in her mind as the surly guy. Too much, and he was the one that she would remember because she really would have liked for him to stay and flirt for a little bit longer. He already had a reputation with the police for coming back from the dead; the last thing that the needed was for people to start making note of him as he passed. When she colored briefly and looked back down at her countertop, Dean knew that he had struck the right balance.

The date on the newspaper article was nearly a year previously, so Dean was not expecting a pile of rubble with tendrils of smoke still rising from the wreckage. He did think that after this much time there would surely be the beginnings of new construction, not this great empty scar marking the landscape. The foundation had been cleared of rubble and a chain link fence thrown up around the property, but that was all that had been done. There were even still scorch marks and the occasional scraps of wood left to litter the cement. A bit of stained glass crunched beneath Dean's boots as he hopped the fence and strode across the law, stopping finally at the edge of the foundation and looking down into what he guessed was the house's basement. The EMF reader that he slid from his jacket pocket was Bobby's, one more reminder that everything that he, Sam, and Dad had managed to accumulate over the past two decades had been taken away in the ruined Impala, but it did the job. It began to beep as soon as he switched it on, and so energetically that he swore under his breath.

"What are you doing here?" Dean had been so focused on the beeping of the EMF that he had not heard the sound of a car pulling up to the curb behind him or the sound of the gate being unlocked and opened. When the woman's voice sounded out, he startled hard and only by the grace of fighter's reflexes managed to keep himself from tumbling over the edge of the foundation and into the basement. Dean quickly switched the machine off and shoved it into his jacket pocket as he turned to face the owner of the voice, but not before it gave a particularly loud and unrepentant squawk.

The woman standing behind him had long brown hair and equally brown eyes, and she was holding the hands of the two little boys who were standing on either side of her. The smallest of the boys looked up at his mother for a moment, gauging her expression, and then screwed up his face in preparation to cry. If Dean had not recognized the woman before, then surely the resemblance between the two of them would have been enough to light the final bulb for him.

"Piper," Dean nearly said, and bit the words back just in time. "Mrs. Halliwell," he said instead, doing his best to strive for a courteous, polite, and reserved tone. None of these were exactly his strong points, but he gave it a shot all the same.

Piper's eyes had been firmly fixed onto the pocket of Dean's jacket from the moment that the EMF had given its final shriek. When she looked up at Dean's face again, her expression suggested that it would be very wise of him to take his usual lines and put them into retirement for now. When Dean spoke her name, her entire face slammed shut. It was akin to watching a shutter fall down over a window. "How do you know who I am?" she snapped.

Damnit. Dean pulled both of his hands free from his pockets and held them out, palms up, in the universal gesture of peace. He misses Sam so much that it was a physical ache. Sam would have flashed this woman a look from beneath his lashes that made him look at least five years younger, invoked the maternal in her, and would have had her eating out of his hand in under a minute. "I'm sorry, ma'am," Dean began again, flashing Piper the same smile that he had given the librarian a few days before. "I didn't mean to scare you."

Rather than tightening her grip on her children's hands and then tugging them closer against her body as Dean would have expected a mother to do, Piper released them both. Wyatt, the oldest, immediately went over to his younger brother and stood in front on him, while Chris peeped out from beneath Wyatt's elbow with large, dark eyes. Piper curled her newly-freed hands into fists as if in preparation for a fight, though she was carrying no weapons that Dean could see. Some people didn't need them, he reminded himself, even women with two children at her side.

"I'm not scared," Piper said crisply. What she was was angry, but she didn't need to say that out loud in order for Dean to read all of the signals loud and clear. There were two points of color high up on her cheeks, like inexpertly applied rouge, and her eyes were narrowed into slits. Her hands had still not uncurled themselves from their fists. "I'm waiting for an answer. Why are you here, and how do you know who I am?"

The smile did not seem to be gaining him any ground, so Dean let it slide from his face. He still kept his hands where Piper could see them so that he did not alarm her or the little boys any more than he had already. Wyatt and Chris were both clutching flowers in their hands. "I'm sorry," Dean said again. "I'm a journalism major at UCSF-" Piper ran her eyes across him from head to foot, her expression showing clearly her disbelief. Dean was aware that he was getting past the age where the bright-eyed freshman story was believable. He grinned and shook his head. "Yeah, I know, I switch my major one more time and I'm going to become one of those perpetual students who totters across the grounds with their walkers. I'm doing an article on this place, you know, one of the oldest buildings in the city, long history-" For the first time, Dean made the connection between the date mentioned in the article and the flowers that both boys were clutching in their hands. He swore inwardly, a blistering oath that would like as not have had Missouri smacking him upside the head again if she had been there. Dad would not have missed that detail. Sam would not have, either. Not for the first time, the weight of trying to be both at once was staggering.

"Populated by three crazy women, blew up one year ago today," Piper finished for him. Apparently deciding that being obnoxious did not qualify him as an actual threat, she extended one of her hands out to her boys again. Wyatt took it solemnly and hung onto Chris with his other, so that the three are linked in a human chain of big to small. He looked up at his mother for a moment before he mimicked her stance of resigned defiance. "So maybe you're a student and maybe you're not, but I'll give you the same advice that I've given all of the others: until I decide to sell this property, I get to decide who walks on it and who doesn't. If I see you again, I'm going to call the police and file charges against you for trespassing."

Dean smiled again as he realized that all of his attempts to charge Piper were at best going to fly right over her head and at worst were only going to piss her off further. He held up hands up further and said, "Didn't mean to upset you ma'am, really. Guess I just don't have the touch. I've been thinking of giving accounting a whirl, though." He strode past the three figures, two of which were standing ramrod-straight like soldiers and the third of which was clinging to his brother and watching Dean with big eyes. The EMF had shrieked in the second between Dean turning to face them and switching the machine off. There was no way of knowing which one of them it had been indicating. Perhaps even all three, but the signal that he had gotten off of them was by far stronger than the one that he had been getting out of the house itself. That was not something that he planned to ignore.

"Hey, buddy!" Dean heard Piper call from behind him. He turned to see that she had cocked a disbelieving eyebrow at him. "Most reporters bring a notebook or a tape recorder with them with they're hoping to catch a free story."

Dean forces himself to grin again and spread his hands even further apart. "Accounting," he repeated. "I'm better with numbers than I am with words, anyway."

Piper did not look as if she believed him, but so long as he was willing to leave she was willing to let him go. "Here's hoping." She turned back to view the wreckage of her house, and Chris followed her lead and turned back also. Only Wyatt remained craned around so that he could watch Dean go. If it was possible for a kid of no older than four or five to look threatening, then Wyatt was doing his very best.

"Creepy little shit," Dean muttered as he walked back to his car-a legitimate one this time. He wondered if that sentiment could be extended to the family as a whole.

Dean had been sloppy and out of practice during his first visit to the house, he was willing to admit that. There was a groove to hunting alone that he either could not or would not slide into, and it was tripping him up. He would not do that again. Dean returned to the Halliwell site shortly after midnight, carrying with him the flashlight, the EMF, and a gun loaded with rock salt, just in case he should wander across anything unfriendly while he was there. He did not think that he was dealing with ghosts here, but with three sudden, violent deaths occurring at the same time and the way that the EMF had gone insane earlier he was not going to take anything for granted. He knew from his own experience that a load of rock salt to the chest would put just about anything to the ground, supernatural or not.

The neighborhood was quiet as Dean hopped over the chain link fence for the second time, but the sky flashed and danced with the beginnings of an electrical storm. Dean stared up at it, frowning, as he walked across the lawn.

Dean's assurances to himself did little to settle his nerves, and remembering about how a whole trunk's worth of weaponry did nothing to save his brother or his father did even less. He tightened his jaw until he could feel a muscle in his cheek ticking as he scrambled down the foundation and into the basement himself. So basically he was starting out on his own with nothing more than a car, a half-dozen or so weapons that he had collected in the months since then, and a stubborn refusal to quit. And some people still said that time was not a great big wheel, always looping back around to where it began again.

Before Dean could even turn on the EMF again to get a reading, almost before his boots even touched the basement floor, the knew that what had occurred earlier in the day was not a fluke. His body was enveloped with cold so strong and so sudden that it snapped his jaw shut and made his entire body break out in prickles of gooseflesh. At the same time, he thought that he could feel fingers drifting across his face, smelled perfume, and saw the faint outline of a woman's form from the corner of his eye. She was gone by the time that he turned his head.

Dean started to raise his gun before he remembered Missouri's words and lowered them again. If this place was the epicenter of whatever it was that Missouri felt brewing, then a few restless spirits ought to be the least of its problems. "Sorry, babe," he said to the presence that was making the air tremble all around him. "The star-crossed love affair might make for a good movie, but I really don't see us working out." The female presence retreated. Dean thought that he might even have amused her. If there was one ghost in this place that had proven itself to be friendly, then that left two more probable ones that had proven no such thing. Dean reminded himself not to relax and pulled the EMF from his pocket. Clenching the flashlight between his teeth and maintaining his grip on the gun with one hand, Dean used the other to turn on the machine. It immediately began to squall, loudly enough to make Dean cast a quick glance at the top of the foundation for curious neighbors.

He let out a low whistle when he saw the reading that was being spit back at him. Yeah, that wasn't coming from a few restless spirits, and he was willing to bet anything that it was not a faulty gas line that blew the entire house sky-high and three blocks over. Missouri was looking more and more right by the moment. Not that it was going to stop her from being a complete pain in the ass whenever Dean had to admit it to her.

"Why, Mrs. Halliwell," Piper breathed as he continued to stare down at the glowing, dancing numbers of the EMF, "I'm beginning to think that you weren't being completely honest with me." Not that he had been given the chance to ask her any real questions, the way that she had spun herself into protective mother bear mode and come after him so quickly, but he could have put a few interesting ones to her that she would have had some trouble answering. Especially if he had been given a crack at this kind of data first.

Dean shut the EMF off abruptly and shoved it back into his jacket so that he could grip the flashlight and the shotgun again. As he looked for a handhold that he could use to climb up the basement wall again, the sky above him was cracked into pieces by lightning, yet there was no hint of rain on the wind. Dean looked up, scowling. "I haven't forgotten, you son of a bitch," he vowed. Did this count as ripping open those wounds that Missouri had so scolded him about? Well, he had never been that good a student. She would have to forgive him.

Meanwhile, there was power in this place, and a hell of a lot of it. It if was the source of whatever it was that was rippling out as far away as Missouri in Lawrence, then it was also going to be too much for him to handle with a flashlight and a rifle filled with rock salt. He needed bigger and badder weapons, because when he came after that monster, he meant to put it down so that it couldn't get up ever again. It might not be the demon that was making was making this place light up like a supernatural Christmas tree, but if it led him to it then Dean would still count it as time well spent.

He had been willing to back off of the demon that killed his mother in order to keep the rest of his family safe once, Dean remembered. It seemed like an altogether different century and different version of himself that had made that decision. Standing on the other side of that fence, he wondered if he would ever be able to be that person again. Maybe there was a trick to running on nothing more than revenge and will, some kind of harnessed fire that Dad and Sam were able to tap into that thus far had nothing but elude him. It had been less than a year, but already he felt as if it was going to burn him alive before he ever figured out the secret.

There was a draft across the back of Dean's neck as he finally found a place where the cement was scorched and pitted enough to so that he could get a good handhold and pull himself up. He much preferred his magnetism when it applied towards actual living women. Dean swatted at the back of his neck and said, "All right, the first time was kind of flattering, but now it's just getting weird." The fingers on the back of his neck changed abruptly, going from the teasing touch of the first ghost and into something cruel and unyielding as iron. It tightened on the back of his neck and yanked him backwards from the wall without preamble. Dean landed on the basement floor with enough force to knock all of the air out of his lungs, making the world go black around the edges. He wheezed out an obscenity with what air he had left and threw himself to the side on pure instinct to avoid the blow that he knew was coming. The nails that slashed at his throat missed cutting his jugular by less than an inch; Dean raised the rifle and fired the rifle at the place where the woman would be standing if she was still alive.

The rock salt cut through the air, and an unearthly squeal followed. For a moment, the outline of a woman stood in front of Dean. Even with nothing more than the dim light from the streetlamps and the stars, he could see that she had been pretty when she was alive, with long, red-gold hair and a pixie's face. That beauty was destroyed by the sneer that the sneer that was twisting her features now.

There had been three people killed in the explosion, Dean remembered. Two were Halliwells, and the third had never been identified. After Piper herself had professed ignorance and no family members had come forward, the assumption had been that she was a runaway who had been cutting across the front lawn at the wrong time.

"Either that's one nasty runaway, or your sister's a real bitch, Piper," Dean muttered. He fired again as the ghost advanced, and she disappeared in a whirl of mist. Dean ground his teeth together and wondered how much of a needle in a haystack it would be to find a grave for a Jane Doe. The police would probably love for their suspected murderer to crop up again lighting graves on fire for no apparent reason.

"Journalism student, my ass," a voice said from behind Dean. He twisted around and caught a glimpse of brunette hair before there was a flash of ozone-

-and Dean was craning his head up to look at the sun, just rising high enough over the horizon for its first rays to burn away the dew. "The fuck?" he muttered, getting back up to his feet and twisting to work the cricks out of his back. It had been less than half an hour after midnight when he had climbed down into the basement, and now he was watching the sun rise from a vantage point on the Halliwell lawn.

"Nice try, Mrs. Halliwell," Dean said. He could feel his expression darkening as he spotted the remains of his EMF scattered several feet away. It looked as if Piper had had a stiletto-heeled tantrum all over it before she left. "Now that's just vindictive."

As Dean was working the last of the stiffness from his back and running through a list of creatures powerful enough to throw a whammy on him lasting for several hours, his cell phone rang. "Better shuck your buns, sugar," Missouri said before Dean even had the chance to greet her. "It's coming to a head, and fast."

"Did you pester my dad like this?" Dean asked her. His voice was more snappish than he had intended, but so far as he knew Missouri would have been able to pick up on his mood even if he had tried to behave himself.

Missouri made an impatient noise. Even without being able to see her face, Dean knew that if he had been standing next to her he would have earned himself a swat. "Your daddy didn't tell you everything," Missouri said. Yeah, Dean was starting to realize that. "Just take the help when it's offered. And be careful." Dean was so surprised by the offer, and by the worry in her voice, that it was not until he had already hung up the phone that he realized that he had forgotten to thank her.

End Part Two


	3. Chapter 3

Part Three

"My _ass_," Piper repeated as she slid the key into the apartment door, as she had been doing steadily and with great and greater amounts of conviction ever since she had driven away from the manor's site. She had known from the moment that she had first seen that Jack, or Al, or Ramone, that he was going to be trouble.

"Hard to know what to call him when he has an ID for every occasion," Piper muttered to herself. She gave the door a quick pound with the flat of her hand when it stuck in the same old spot that it always did and smothered her brief pang when she realized that the sticking spot was now familiar to her. There had been plans to rebuild; Piper told herself that there were still plans to rebuild. Everything that had happened since then had just forced them to be shoved to the wayside for a little longer than she had expected, was all.

"I am _so_ sorry," Piper said to the figure sleeping in the chair in front of the television as she hurriedly shut the door behind her. He stirred and rubbed at his eyes. "I didn't think that it would be anything more than a quick visit, but things got…complicated."

"They seem to have a way of doing that," Henry agreed as he rose from his chair. Even a year later, he still looked exhausted. Piper wondered if, looking in the mirror, she would see a similar face staring back at her.

Henry's eyes widened when he caught sight of Piper's face. "You're bleeding."

Piper lifted her hand to her cheek so that she could finger the three deep scratches that were running across her jaw and down into her neck. They had closed on their own earlier; she must have done something on the way home to crack them open again. "Christy," she said, feeling something that wanted to be a smile and could not quite manage touching the corners of her mouth. "Spunky as ever." Piper headed for the bathroom and the first aid kit. She could hear Henry's footsteps behind her. "Did the boys get to sleep all right?"

Henry made a noncommittal noise. "Wyatt's old enough to know that there's something about today that's making everyone upset. Chris knows that his brother's upset, so he's upset."

"I'm sorry," Piper said as she pulled down the bottle of rubbing alcohol and began dabbing at her cuts, wincing from the sting.

"Here, let me." Henry took the bottle from her and began cleaning the scratches. He put his hand beneath her chin and tilted her face up so that he could see what he was doing. "Some of my parolees are bad seeds, but a lot of them are kids in over their heads, getting into fights, being abused." Henry's chuckle had nothing to do with mirth. "I've patched up worse, believe me."

Piper knew that her smile was not much happier. Quite a pair that they were making. "Unfortunately, having Leo and Paige around for these kinds of things spoiled me."

Piper could feel Henry's fingers pause for a moment at the mention of his late wife before he resumed cleaning up her face. "Wyatt was asking questions earlier about why you were gone," Henry said. "I wasn't sure how much you wanted me to tell him."

"That every ugly thing that flies, walks, or slithers will want to come see the place where the Charmed Ones died and Mommy has to go and make sure that nothing crawls out of hell that could hurt somebody?" Piper asked in a faux-bright voice. "That's a little much for a four year-old to handle, but Wyatt's never been a normal boy. He knows that Paige and Phoebe are dead, even though that might not mean much to him when Great Grandma still pops in whenever she wants. I still want to shield him from as much as I can, though. I'll have to figure something out." Granted, she had always thought that Wyatt would be surrounded by a full magical family to help him as he grew into his abilities. Funny how life wound up twisting on you.

Henry finished cleaning up Christy's little love taps and smoothed a couple of Chris's Ninja Turtle bandages over the scratches. Piper smiled in spite of herself, picturing what the reaction would be at the club when she showed up later to do the books with her snazzy new accessories. "You should probably think about explaining more to him," Henry told her gently as he stepped away and put the alcohol and the bandages back into the medicine cabinet. "He was asking about Leo, too."

"Damn it." Piper rubbed at her eyes as the weight of the entire night decided to come settling down over her shoulders at once. "He probably still thinks that Leo can come back, since he was able to come back the last time. Damn it," she repeated, and looked back up at Henry. "I'm sorry." She thought that she had apologized to him at least once every time that she had seen him since Paige died. "You probably have other things that you wanted to do tonight instead of watching the boys while I went out and waited for demons that didn't even show."

"It's all right." No, it wasn't. Piper could hear from Henry's voice that it wasn't, but she also knew that it had nothing to do with her. "I went by the grave earlier and, you know, talked to her a little bit." The two of them must have made a hell of a sight, Piper realized, standing in the bathroom at dawn and mourning over the same pair of women. She knew that Henry waited for months to see if being half Whitelighter would be enough to bring Paige back, as it had brought Leo back the first time that he had died. She had waited for the same thing.

Almost as if he had the same thoughts running through his head, Henry shivered and said in an attempt at a normal tone, "Did you vanquish anything interesting?"

"No." Piper shook her head. "First anniversary of the Charmed Ones' death, and not a thing. I don't know whether I should be incredibly gratified or incredibly insulted. The only one who showed up was a mortal." She felt Henry stiffen beside her and went on before he could speak. "No one dangerous, I don't think, just an amateur ghost hunter. He had a gun, but it was only loaded with rock salt, and it was the only thing that kept Christy from cutting his throat for him. I smashed all of his other toys."

"You sure that's not something that you should be worried about?" Henry asked her. "If he has experience with dealing with the magical world…"

Piper's snort was rueful. For a moment, she almost sounded like herself again. "Henry, the list of people who know about us could fill the telephone book at this point. I'm more worried about what he can _prove_. And what he can prove amounts to a big, fat nothing." That still hadn't stopped her from worrying about memory alteration spells for the rest of the night, but that was Piper's problem. Henry didn't need to carry anything else. He had barely known her before Paige had died and had already shown a willingness to go out on a limb for her numerous times over the past several months.

Piper might be having problems with her magic at the moment, but they were completely her own to deal with. She touched at the scratches on her face and said instead, "You do good work."

"Told you. Experience." It was clear from Henry's eyes that Piper's attempts at a normal tone were not convincing him. "So, Christy doesn't seem all that interested in crossing over to the other side."

"She's probably worried about what's waiting for her there," Piper muttered, but she already knew where Henry was going, and he had a point.

"So she's going to hang around, and sooner or later it's going to be some neighborhood kid that climbs over that fence."

"And she's attacking other people now, not just me," Piper finished. "She was a powerful witch. Exorcising her is going to take time." And she was minus two-thirds of the Charmed Ones, had a Book of Shadows that made her hands shake just to open it, and, while she could make her inherent powers work just fine, was having trouble casting spells that required anything more complicated than lighting a candle. She was a hell of a candidate for the job. Even so, even if she was trying to raise her boys, hold down a job, and stand all by herself on the vanquishing front, it was time to get it in gear. Piper added up all of the math in her head and decided that a year's passage had not changed a thing: she would still wring Christy's neck without remorse if the witch had a neck for Piper to wrap her hands around, and would still happily use Billie as a stand-in if the girl ever got up the nerve to show her face again.

Henry squeezed at Piper's shoulder once in comfort, and she leaned into the touch. After her night, she desperately needed it. Henry kneaded at Piper's shoulder for a moment, rubbing out the tension, until Piper sighed in pleasure and tilted her head back. His mouth came down softly on hers.

It was a good kiss, sweet and slow. Piper parted her lips and even thought about letting it continue for one crazy moment. It was not broken until she felt Henry's hand come up to cup the side of her face. His wedding band felt cool against her cheek. She had not taken hers off yet, either.

The two rings might as well be communicating with each other to send an electric charge passing from one to the other. She put her hand against Henry's chest and pushed him away before quickly bringing her other up to cover her mouth. Henry stumbled back against the sink; Piper all but leapt sideways into the shower. "Oh," she said. "Okay, well, that's just a bad plan."

Henry looked almost as shocked by his own actions as Piper was. He started to rub at his mouth and then dropped his hand abruptly back down to his side, as if he was afraid that he would hurt Piper's feelings if it looked as if he was scrubbing her taste away. "Yeah," he agreed with her. "It's been a weird night."

"I'm sorr-" Piper shut her mouth around the word. She really needed to get out of the habit of doing that. Piper reached out and rubbed at Henry's arm instead. "Are you working today?"

"Off." Henry made a face as he said it. Piper was pretty sure that it wasn't one of his normal days off, but instead had been suggested to him by his sergeant. She was pretty sure that it had been a liberal definition of "suggest", too.

"Go home and get some sleep before you wind up walking into a wall or driving into a telephone pole or something," Piper told him. "Come over for dinner sometime this week, if you want." She paused for a moment and took stock of how tense the air between them still was. "Maybe next week."

"Next week sounds like a better idea," Henry agreed quickly. He hesitated for a moment before he pulled her into an awkward hug and kissed her on the forehead. "I'm here if you need me."

"You just watched my kids for twelve hours straight," Piper said. "How much more there for me can you possibly be?" Without taking a U-turn into the scary and awkward territory that they had just flirted with, that was.

Henry's lips twitched upwards. That was about as close to a smile as he came. "You know what I mean." He shrugged and looked embarrassed. "My credibility might be shot right now, but I'm here."

"I know." Piper reached and gave Henry's hand a squeeze. "Next week?"

"Next week." Henry let himself out of the apartment. Piper listened to the sound of the apartment door shutting behind him before she let out a long sigh and, brushing her hair back from her face, let the bathroom. The boys' room was dark. That still didn't stop Piper from halting in the doorway and listening to the two of them breathing for a moment before she continued to her own room. It ought to be strange, she figured, that it was the anniversary of her sisters' deaths and she had not cried once. After all of the tears that she had shed over the past year, she would think that the past few days would have rendered her into a barely-functioning wreck. Instead, she was allowing her sister's widower to kiss her. Piper was letting him kissing her, and there had been moments in there when she had given serious consideration to kissing him back.

Piper groaned and dropped her head into her hands as she reached her room and took a seat on the edge of her bed. "It hasn't even been eight months yet," she whispered to herself, and heard horror in her voice. Looking up, the first thing that she saw was a picture of the entire family back when they had still been a family. That hardly made things better. Piper reached out and was on the verge of turning the picture around so that she would not have to look Leo in the face before she changed her mind and pulled the Book of Shadows from the dresser and into her lap instead. Right on cue, her hands began to tremble. Taking a deep breath and ordering herself to knock this crap off right now, Piper opened the book and began flipping briskly through it for something that would help her exorcise a powerful witch with a nasty grudge. Christy had taken months longer than most ghosts to manifest herself, but that didn't mean that Piper wasn't still being remiss in her duties by letting her stay this long.

"I know," Piper said as she raised her head again and looked Leo in the eye. "I know, I know. It's going to stop. It has to stop." Her voice shook more than she liked, and she there was finally the burn of tears in her eyes. If only her hands didn't tremble as she held the Book of Shadows in her lap, and if only the thought of writing a spell didn't make her queasy. It had been powerful magic as much as it had been Billie and Christy that had killed her sisters, and the absence of it was the reason that her husband was not with her now. It seemed as if every which way that she turned, her gifts were finding ways to trip her up.

"Mommy?"

Piper ordered the tears fiercely to stop before they had a chance to really get started, raising her hand so that she could dash at the few rebel drops that had dared to run down her face. She finished dabbing beneath each eye before she turned to face her son. "Hey, Wyatt. It's kind of early for you to be up, isn't it?"

"Chris is snoring." Chris had not snored a day in his life. Piper should know, having spent enough time standing over his crib and watching him in the weeks after he had been born, and in the paranoid months after his aunts had died. At the rate that things were going, both of the boys would be lucky if she let them go to kindergarten.

"Is he?" Piper stood from the bed and held out one of her arms so that Wyatt could burrow himself against her side. "Well, since you're awake now, how about we make some breakfast. Do you want pancakes?"

Wyatt squirmed further against Piper's side and turned his face into her hip without answering for a long moment. "When is Daddy coming home?" He didn't lift his face away from her jeans, so that Piper had to strain in order to make out what he was saying.

Her heart twisted and for a moment did not know whether it wanted to remain whole or shatter altogether. It was a feeling that she was well familiar with by this point. She put her hand on the top of her son's head and stroked at the golden hair that was so like his father's. "Daddy's not coming home, kiddo," she told him in a soft voice, measuring each word carefully. "Daddy died."

"He came back last time." Even though Wyatt was still speaking into the side of her leg, he sounded as if he was near tears. Her son was not a talker by nature; he must have been saving this up for days.

"Oh, Wyatt." Piper gently untangled Wyatt from her side so that she could kneel in front of him. "Daddy didn't die last year. He just had to go away for a little while, and then he could come back again."

"Grandma still gets to come back sometimes."

Piper had been dreading the day when he finally made that leap. "Ghosts are funny," she said. "Some people are able to come back, and some people can't. It depends on whether or not they die suddenly-" Leo had. "And whether they think that they have unfinished business-" With a wife and two children left behind, there was a part of Piper that could not help but think that Leo should feel this way and find a way to come back to her, even though she tried to squash it whenever she arose. "It also depends a lot on whether or not that person was a witch." Bingo. "Your daddy didn't have any powers, Wyatt. That doesn't meant that he doesn't love us, and that doesn't mean that he would not come back if he could. He just can't."

Wyatt stood in front of Piper and studied her face without fidgeting, almost without blinking. Piper was not sure where he had gotten this strange streak of stoicism. Certainly not from her, or from Leo. "I want him to come back."

"So do I." Piper pulled Wyatt into a hug before she released him and rose back to her feet. She had been lukewarm on the thought of breakfast before, but her appetite was definitely gone now. Wyatt's face said the same. "Let's go check on Chris."

The apartment only had two bedrooms, so Chris and Wyatt shared a room while Piper stayed down the hall. P3 was doing well enough that, between that income and the insurance money that she still had not spent, she could more than afford something larger. At the moment, she did not see the need. Losing first their aunts, then their father in such quick succession had caused Wyatt and Chris to cling to one another like lifelines. Chris was even prone to crying whenever Wyatt was in a different room from him for too long. Piper remembered how she and Prue had hugged one another after their own mother had died. It had dissolved back into sibling squabbling soon enough; Piper would let Wyatt and Chris remain friends for as long as they could.

Chris was sleeping peacefully in the crib that he was almost too large for now, his arms sprawled out over his head in a posture so comical that it was all that Piper could do to hide her smile. She stood over the crib and watched her youngest son sleep for several long minutes, counting each breath that he drew as if it might be the last one that she ever heard. Wyatt was as firm and implacable as a half-sized soldier beside her. Having said his piece in her room, he now seemed content to save up his words until he needed them for his next lengthy outburst. The way that they were going, that would be in about six months or so. Piper had not thought of him as exactly being a chatterbox even before Leo had died, but now it seemed as if he could go hours without saying a word.

Piper reached out and ruffled Wyatt's hair. "Think that we should wake Chris up for pancakes, or just let him sleep?"

Wyatt cocked his head to one side and studied Chris through the bars of his crib for a long moment. "He'll want cereal when he wakes up," he announced. He had been doing that with increasing frequency over the past several months. Piper was not sure if it was some new gift showing itself, akin to Phoebe's premonitions, if was symptomatic of the closeness that he and Chris had developed, or if Wyatt was just going through a bit of a bossy phase that Chris was allowing.

"More pancakes for us," Piper announced with false cheer, even though the thought of eating was only slightly less stomach churning than it had been a few moments before. She took Wyatt's hand and began to lead him from the room. "You can stir the batter."

Piper had scarcely reached the door when she paused, feeling a strange prickle of unease run up her spine, the cause of which she could not hope to name. The room felt unaccountably hot and crowded from one moment to the next. It was not even June yet, though, and Henry liked to set the thermostat down to glacial levels whenever he was watching the boys. Piper always joked that she was going to come home one of these nights and find a layer of frost covering all three of them.

She glanced down at Wyatt, saw that he was looking up at her, and his small face was screwed up in worry. "Yeah, kiddo, I felt it, too," Piper told him. "So how about we just grab Chris, stay calm, and-"

Piper felt a lurching in her belly, as if a fishhook had been placed into her navel and then violently jerked forward. For a moment, her vision was so filled with blue light that she could see nothing else at all. By the time that Piper had blinked twice, her vision had cleared and she was on the other side of the room, standing beside Chris's crib again. Wyatt was still clutching her hand tightly within his own. Though his face was calm, Piper could feel him shaking all the way into her elbow. After blinking several more times, Piper realized that there was nothing wrong with her sight, even though the world was still being shown to her through a haze of blue. Wyatt had cast a shield around all three of them in addition to orbing himself and Piper back across the room.

Chris began to kick and mutter in his sleep. Piper reached into the crib and picked up her baby before he could fully wake, needing to hold him close to her. A drop of sweat that was equal parts fear and the sudden, sharp increase in heat ran down the back of her neck. She reached out with her free hands so that she could push at the barrier that Wyatt had constructed around them. It was like pushing against the skin of a balloon, only allowing her to stretch it so far before it snapped back. It made the pads of Piper's fingers tingle.

"Well, it's certainly different being on the other side of this," Piper said, pushing again. Chris woke up fully at last and stared around the room with big owl eyes. He rubbed at them and then screwed up his face as if he was contemplating a good cry. The room was hotter than ever. "Wyatt, honey, you want to let Mommy go, so that we can leave?" No sisters. Just herself and two small children that she would lay down her life for.

Wyatt tilted his face up and gave her a look suggesting that, vast difference in experience between them or not, there were moments when he severely doubted her sanity. "Wyatt," Piper began in a warning tone at the same moment that someone began to pound on the apartment door. Of course they did. "_Now_."

Wyatt dropped the shield, and Piper clutched Chris more tightly to her chest than ever as she hurried for the door. One quick stop for the book, and then they would be gone. Chris was not crying, not yet. What he was doing was fisting his hands through her hair and tugging so hard that Piper could not help but pull her lips back from her teeth at the pain, something that he had not done since he was less than a year old. Piper held him to her that much closer as she put her hand into the small of Wyatt's back and ushered him quickly towards the hallway.

There was an enormous whooshing noise behind her, and Piper was jerked backwards so hard that she nearly dropped Chris down to the carpet. She shoved him quickly into his older brother's arms before he could begin to scream. "Take Chris and go outside!" she yelled. Piper could only hope that the pounding at her door was a neighbor. In all of her colorful years of experience, she had never known a demon that knocked and then politely waited to be granted entrance.

Wyatt twitched when his mother yelled at him, and Chris finally screwed up his face and let loose the wail that he had been building up to ever since Piper had wrenched him from his crib. Chris was a toddler now, too old for Wyatt to carry by himself. He put his arm around his younger brother's shoulders before he pulled him close against his side. They both began stumbling towards the door.

Piper had spent eight years hunting and being hunted by the nastiest creatures that stalked both the earth and the underworld. She knew what eyes against the back of her neck felt like. Before another powerful telekinetic blast could jerk her backwards and nearly pull her off of her feet, she spun around to face her attacker. Her jaw dropped.

"You _bitch_," Piper breathed, and raised her hands.

Before she could get off of a blast, Piper was lifted entirely off of her feet and slammed back against the wall, hard enough to make the plaster flake off and rain down into her hair. The discomfort that she had felt when Chris orbed her was mild compared to the hook that she felt entering her spine, hurling her back against the wall hard whenever she tired to move hard enough to make tears of pain spring forth into her eyes. Flames erupted from the ceiling directly above Chris's crib at the same time that Piper felt as if claws were being dragged across her stomach. The fire threw out angry fingers that ran swiftly across the ceiling and then reached for the walls. The heat was immense.

The hook moved, no longer content to hold Piper against the wall but now also dragging her upwards along it. The speed and the pain were so great that Piper could not even make a sound; all that she could do was wheeze as her feet left the floor.

"Mommy!" Wyatt screamed. He forgot all about Piper's order for him to leave and lunged forward, leaving Chris standing along in the doorway. Chris balled his hands into fists by his sides, raised his face towards the ceiling, and simply screamed.

Grunting with the effort, Piper lifted her arms away from the wall. It was not easy; she felt as if someone was trying to staple her to the plaster. Drawing her lips back from her teeth again, Piper let loose with what she already knew was going to be her most powerful burst of energy to date. She might be struggling with the magic in the book, but the power at its most primal was still hers to command. It made the skin on Piper's arms rise up into hard knots of gooseflesh and tingle as it passed, made the tips of her fingers ache. It was almost strong enough to knock down a wall, and it was certainly strong enough knock the blonde bitch backwards and against Chris's crib hard enough to send the both of them clattering down to the carpet. The flames enveloped her within seconds. Piper did not care to watch what happened afterwards.

The hook rusted, then snapped, all within a span of time that surely lasted no more than five seconds. Piper fell heavily back down to the floor. She pushed herself back up to her knees as Wyatt rushed to her, flinging his arms around her and babbling so quickly that Piper could only understand one word out of every three. With all of the extra words that he was spilling today, Piper would be lucky if he spoke again before he was eight.

Piper dragged Wyatt against her chest and rained kisses down on his face, forgetting for the moment that he had chosen the worst of all possible times to disobey her. She took his hand in her own and raced for the door. The only pause that Piper made was to lean down and scoop Chris, one-handed, into a carry that made a mockery of the klutz that she had been as a teenager. Chris continued to shriek without bothering to form words. Every smoke detector in the house was wailing in tandem, and by listening hard Piper could hear the alarms in the units next to hers going off as well. The collective cacophony was making her head throb in a perfect rhythm to every beat of her heart.

There was a part of Piper, a significant part, that wanted nothing more than to rush back into the boys' room and finish the vengeance that Phoebe and Paige could no longer take for themselves. If the smoke had not become so thick, if she could not hear Chris's panicked wheezing in her ear and feel Wyatt gripping her hand hard enough to turn the knuckles black and blue when he finally let her go, she might have spun around and done just that. As it was, Piper ducked her head to avoid the worst of the smoke, coughed hard, and pushed on.

Even if the person at the front door had been silly enough to keep knocking when sounds of battle and the smell of smoke began to roll out into the hallway, Piper would not have been able to pick it out among all of the other noises. The person in the hallway was as a result very nearly the victim of a zap every bit as hard as the one that she had hurled in the boys' room when she let go of Wyatt's hand long enough to reach for the door, only to have it bounce inward before she could touch it. Piper grabbed for Wyatt and pressed him back against her thigh as she spun all of them around so that she could protect her boys with her own body. Whirling back, Piper hoped desperately that it would be Henry, coming back to reclaim something that he had forgotten or on nothing more than a hunch.

No such luck.

"Oh, my _ass_," Piper said again.

Jack of the many names barely glanced at her before he stared down the hallway, where the flames had turned the hallway into a billowing hell. His face was hard, intent, a hunter's expression. Piper didn't think that this was his first time seeing a situation like this. The only thing that kept her from freezing where he stood was the realization that she had, terribly, forgotten the one thing that she had left from her old life.

"The Book!" Piper exclaimed, forgetting Jack momentarily so that she could whirl back towards her room. She didn't have to go more than a step before she knew that it would be a lost cause. Flames whipped and danced in her room, turning the doorway into a carpet to ceiling inferno. Her mouth fell open.

"Come on!" Jack bellowed at her, grabbing for her elbow when she seemed more inclined to stare than to rush after him towards safety. He reached for Wyatt's free hand so that he could jerk the boy into the hallway, but Wyatt only shrank further back against Piper and glared with all of his four year-old's hostility. He had not spoken since they had left the bedroom, and he was carrying himself like a miniature soldier again.

"Come on," Jack repeated in a softer tone of voice, glancing once again over Piper's shoulder and at the happily raging fire. "The fire department is already on their way. There's nothing for you here." The look that he threw towards the bedroom again was hungry. Piper wondered if she had been wearing a similar one moments before.

Piper took a deep breath and squeezed once at Wyatt's hand in warning when he began to cast a shield around himself and his family again. Jack's eyes widened for a moment, but that was his only visible reaction. Piper was certain that this was not the first strange thing that he had seen in his life. She meant to ask him a few questions about that very soon.

"Let's go," she said shortly as she shouldered past him and into the hallway. Her neighbors were all peeking their heads out of their doors and then rushing down the hallway as they saw the thick black smoke that was billowing from Piper's apartment. When Jack touched lightly at her arm, she jumped hard and came very close to vanquishing him then and there.

"Are you hurt?" Jack asked her.

Piper glanced down and saw for the first time the thin line of red that was stretching out across the stomach of her blouse. In all of the chaos of the bedroom, she had hardly even felt the pain.

End Part Three


	4. Chapter 4

Part Four

Piper alternated between calling him Jack and Al for a good ten minutes before he finally interrupted her. "I also answer to Dean."

Piper threw him a long, sharp look. She was still holding Chris close against her chest, and he in turn had his arms wrapped around her throat and his face pushed tightly against the side of her neck. Whenever she turned her head to speak to one of the numerous people who had questions for her, Dean could see that Chris had tangled his hands through his mother's hair and formed knots so intricate that it could take hours to untangle him again. Wyatt stood by Piper's side without speaking, his legs braced far apart. Dean wondered for a moment if Wyatt would actually bite his hand if Dean tried to touch his mother without permission.

"Well, I don't know," Piper answered him waspishly. The fire looked as if it was on its way out, but Dean could already tell at a glance that most of her floor was going to be unlivable for a good time to come. "'Dean' is about the only ID that you didn't have."

"Somehow I have the feeling that you know a little something about secret identities yourself," Dean shot back. Piper narrowed her eyes at him without flinching, but Dean missed most of her expression. He was too busy watching the cops as they roamed back and forth taking everyone's statements. There were way too many in one place for Dean to possibly relax around them, and it was taking everything that he had to look as if he belonged there. 'Absolutely, officer, friend of the family, no wanted murderers here.' "And if you hadn't thrown that whammy at me earlier, I might have been able to explain." An officer strode past them, and Dean found a shadow that required his complete attention. When he turned back around, he found Piper watching him with a quirked eyebrow.

"Was he a friend that you're not quite ready to have the tearful reunion with yet?" she asked.

Dean flashed her a thin-lipped smile. "Ease up on the sarcasm, cupcake. I'm not trying to kill you or set your house on fire. I'd say I'm a step up from what you were dealing with earlier."

One of the firefighters approached Piper again. He threw a quick glance over Dean, but that was about as far as his interest extended, and that was just the way that Dean liked it. "I think that we've done all that we can here, Mrs. Halliwell," he said. "Contact your insurance company as soon as you can and find a friend that you can stay with in the meanwhile. It will be a few days before we can make sure that the apartment is safe enough for you to reenter and start seeing what you can salvage."

While the firefighter was speaking, Dean was looking up at what had once been the boys' bedroom window. All of the glass had been blown out by heat, and the brick surrounding the sill was scorched by long, black fingers. Though Dean looked hard, he saw no telltale silhouette standing in the room and waiting for him. Didn't mean that he couldn't still feel it.

He ordered himself to unclench his hands from their fists before he would up cutting himself, looking back down just in time to hear Piper say, "What about the bedrooms?"

"They were both completely destroyed," the firefighter said, and added, "I'm sorry," when Piper's face went white.

"Thank you." Piper made a brief attempt to pull Chris free from her hair before giving it up as a lost cause. She shifted him onto one of her hips instead so that she could reach out and take the man's hand. "There, um, there was just a lot of irreplaceable stuff in there. Pictures and…things. But thank you, for all of your help. I mean that."

"You're very welcome, ma'am." Dean thought that the man was on the verge of tipping his hat before he walked away. He watched the firefighter go and wondered how much simpler his life might have been if he had chosen that as a career instead, and how much more complicated the Halliwells' had just become since fate decided to focus on them.

No, Dean amended a bare second later. Given what he had seen of the family thus far, he was willing to bet that their lives had been pretty damned complicated before he or the demon had ever thought of setting foot in San Francisco. "Are you all right?" he asked Piper, who looked as if she was on the verge of smacking herself in the forehead in frustration.

She shook her head and said, "Yes," ignoring the disbelieving look that Dean gave her. "I made a very stupid mistake."

Dean looked up at the window again and wondered if he had not done the same by not shoving Piper and her family out into the hallway and trusting that they could find their way down to the ground floor and safety from there, while he himself lunged through the flames to deal with the demon. He could have _tried_.

Dean remembered Missouri's phone call and warning to him before he remembered the smell of his own family's blood in his nose. The two of them battled against one another for a moment before he said, "Look, I have a motel room not far from here. It's not exactly the Four Seasons, but it'll be safe while I fight this thing for you."

"We already have somewhere to go," Piper told him. For someone whose home had just been destroyed and who still had the mark of her own close call spanning across her stomach, no matter how she might have insisted to the EMTs that it was nothing more than a scratch, she seemed remarkably calm. Maybe there was more of his mother in Wyatt than Dean had first supposed upon looking at their family picture. She leaned back and gave Dean a long, searching look. He had the feeling that he was being put through some kind of mental test, and still was not sure whether or not he had passed when she rocked back. "You can come with us, since it sure looks like you're tangled up in this mess, too."

Fine. Dean had all the real tools of his trade in the trunk of the new car, anyway, and he was not inclined to argue if it would help him get to the demon that much faster. "Whatever," Dean said gruffly. He took another glance around the parking lot, noting all over again how crowded it was with people in uniforms who might want to put questions to him that he could not answer without winding up in a pair of handcuffs. It had been hours since they had left the apartment, but Piper had still not excused herself to call anyone. "I'll keep an eye on the boys while you call Leo, and we can get on the road."

Dean expected Piper to look surprised and even a little annoyed that he knew the name of her husband, as she had thus far treated him with an icy suspicion suggesting that she still half-expected him to pick their pockets if she let her attention wander for too long. He did not expect her to rear back as if he had slapped her in response to a question that he had actually asked in a pretty courteous tone of voice. Neither did he expect Chris to briefly lift his face from his mother's neck so that he could stare at him, or for Wyatt to once again take on an expression suggesting that he would much rather be a pit bull rather than a little boy.

"How do you know about Leo?" Piper demanded of him. "How much research have you done on my family?"

Dean held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "So you got me, the journalism story was a lie."

"No kidding," Piper said. As tough as her tone was, she was still paler than Dean had ever seen her before, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. Dean remembered a knife that had once belonged to a friend of his father's when Dean had still been small. It had survived centuries, Darien told him while Dean divided his attention between the knife-the dagger, really-and watching his father drop silver bullets from their molds and into a pan of cool water. It had been through so many battles against so many demons, though, that magic was the only thing that was keeping it together any longer. One good tap…

'I hope that you're stronger than that, Mrs. Halliwell,' Dean thought, before he remembered that he was dealing with a family that had a fair bit of magic to call its own. "I looked you up in a newspaper article while I was trying to figure out where that thing up there was going to attack next," Dean told her. "There was some background on the family included. Look, if there's been some kind of nasty breakup or something-"

"Leo died," Piper said shortly. She began the slow, arduous process of disentangling Chris from around her neck with a softly murmured, "Honey, Mommy needs to breathe," so that she could set him down on the ground. He made immediate tracks for the leg that Wyatt was not already guarding.

"I'm sorry," Dean said gruffly, not sure what else there was to say. If the way that Piper turned her head away quickly to study the ruined building was anything to go by, then neither was she interested in hearing it.

"Now you're stealing my lines," she said in a voice so low that Dean could scarcely hear her. A moment later, her face hardened again. "Why were you looking up my family?"

Dean turned and pointed towards the place where Piper's apartment had once been. When he tilted his head just right, the sooty marks almost resembled a face. That wasn't helping the sick, just-ate-glass feeling that had been taken him and had been twisting him ever since he had gotten Missouri's phone call and had looked up where the Halliwells lived now. "That wasn't random."

Piper's face hardened further. She reached out and pulled Chris closer to her, as if he wasn't already doing everything short of actually burrowing into the side of her thigh. "No," she said. "It was a witch."

Yeah, like Dean hadn't already figured out that there were layers upon layers of past history with this family that wasn't exactly going to be found in any newspaper article. He only paused for a second to process that remark before he shook his head. "A demon."

Piper's expression cleared for a second, and she let out a short, hollow laugh. "If only. That, I would know what to do with." Her face underwent another one of those strange freezes before she was able to bring it under her control again, as if she was holding herself together with a white-knuckled grip and nothing else. She might be putting on a good front for the kids, but Dean could still sense that there was a good eruption waiting just inches below the surface, looking for something to set her off. He would wait until her kids were no longer standing out in the open parking lot that was making Dean's skin itch with all of the different angles that he could not cover at once before he began to push at her. "No, I saw her. I know who the witch was, she's had a grudge against me and mine for a long time."

"The demon can possess people that you know," Dean told her. He felt a bitter twist overtake his mouth as he said, "It puts in an extra-special happy place, actually."

Piper stared at him for a long moment, as if taking his measure, before she shook her head and said briskly, "Okay, so I can already tell that this is not a conversation for wide open parking lots." Thank _God_, she had more danger sense than Dean had been willing to give her credit for. "Henry is just going to _love_ seeing me again so soon. Come on, I have a car."

"So do I," Dean said, and pointed towards the Mustang where it sat by the curb.

"Does it have car seats?" Piper asked him.

"No, but it has a trunk filled with things that can stab, shoot, and bludgeon," Dean replied. "All things that put _me_ in an extra special happy place." He could hear the savage note that came into his voice and could not pull it back again before Piper blinked and leaned back subtly. "We can move the car seats."

Piper shrugged, and he could all but see the wheels in her head turning as she decided that their method of transportation was not high enough on her list of priorities to be worth fighting over. If Dean were in her place, he would be more worried about getting into any vehicle that was outside of his control, but Piper had also not gone through the same experiences in a very similar car that Dean less than a year before. He had already seen that kid of hers glow, anyway. There was no telling what else he was able to do if he got spooked.

Working together, it only took the two of them a few minutes to transfer the car seats from Piper's responsible family car and into Dean's. When both of the boys were bundled into the back seat and buckled in more firmly than astronauts at liftoff, Piper slid into the front seat and ran her hands over the dashboard. "My husband loved classic cars," she said in a musing voice, half-sad and half merely nostalgic. Dean stayed quiet, not sure if she even meant to include him in the conversation, or if she was only sharing something with herself and he happened to be here.

"This is a '65 Mustang," Dean couldn't stop himself from pointing out when the silence ran a little too long.

She looked up, confused. "So?"

"So," Dean said, "if your husband had any taste at all, he would not have given this car the time of day." Piper looked at him, snapping out of her fugue long enough for an amused half-smile to cross her face. 'Boys and their toys,' it said, and Dean rolled his eyes. "It's temporary."

"I bow to the superior intellect in this matter." Piper put her seatbelt on and turned to stare out the passenger window. "Leo liked pick-ups best, anyway."

And that put them right back into the happy place where he had no idea what to say, not a place that he was used to and certainly not one that he liked. He cleared his throat and started the car instead. Outside of giving him directions to the house of this friend of hers, Piper seemed to have exhausted her supply of words for the morning, and the boys said nothing at all. If he had been dealing with ordinary people, this was the point where Dean would be peppered with questions about how demons could possibly be real, how they could be stopped, how he was going to make it better, but, well, Piper stole time and her kids glowed. He was pretty sure that ruled out the chances for a normal existence in one fell swoop.

Dean cast Piper several surreptitious glances as he drove and she stared out the passenger window at the passing streets and houses. She was still wearing her wedding band on her left hand, and it caught the light whenever she moved her hand to push a few strands of hair back from her face. It was an easy mistake to make, especially when he was already rattled by the fact that the demon had made the unprecedented move of attacking during the day. The way that Piper had jerked back at the mention of his name would suggest that it had been a recent wound.

"I'm doing the same thing, you know," Piper said without taking her eyes away from the neat, tree-lined streets.

"What's that?" Dean asked, straightening. He glanced into the back seat to check on the boys, almost without realizing that he was even doing it. Chris had calmed down and was busily scrubbing at the tearstains on his face. Wyatt was meeting Dean's gaze through the rearview mirror. He blinked and looked away when he realized that Dean had caught him out.

"Watching you like you're watching me." It was more likely, Dean thought, that she was watching his hands to make sure that they stayed on the steering wheel and where she could see them. The way that her only twitched every time that she was startled had not gone unnoticed.

He flashed her a grin that was easy and relaxed even though he himself was not. "I'm that obvious?"

"Those cops and firefighters weren't making you so nervous because you thought that they were going to be jealous of your slick detective skills." Piper straightened and turned away from the passenger window at last so that she could fix Dean with a long stare. Her eyes were one of the deepest shades of brown that Dean had ever seen, large and searching. "You helped me, and I'm grateful for that. I've gotten help from…dubious…people before, but I want you to know right now, whatever you did, if it's something that could come back to hurt my boys, then turning yourself over to the police will look like a missed opportunity in comparison."

She meant every word of it, too. Dean took one hand from the wheel and held it up in a gesture of mock surrender. "Mrs. Halliwell, as much as this sounds like a cliché, in my case it's true: I'm innocent. Case of mistaken identity."

Piper glanced over at him again. "Evil twin?"

"Close." In for a penny, in for a pound. Given everything else that he knew and suspected about her family, there was every chance that she would not do any more than bat an eye. "Shapeshifter. Decided that my face would be a fun one to take a joyride around in." The grin was almost a reflex by now. It should have had her eating out of his hand within seconds. Maybe there was a delayed reaction at work here or something. "Can you blame him?"

Dean thought that he detected amusement when she looked over at him again. "Shapeshifter," she said flatly. "I liked 'evil twin' better. Don't guess that I'm in a position to decide what's impossible and what's not, though."

Dean cast a pointed glance at Piper's hands where they were folded in her lap. "Not so much."

"What did you do?" Dean made an outraged noise. Piper rolled her eyes. "Okay, fine. What do they _think_ that you did?"

This was the part that Dean had been dreading. He paused to weigh the merits of the truth against those of an outrageous lie, aware that Piper's eyebrows were crawling up when the silence dragged on for too long. Frankly, he had an equal track record with either one. Fine, Dean decided ultimately. He was tired, and it was the kind of day for the truth. Like ripping off a bandaid. He was sure that Missouri would approve. "They think that I killed somebody."

"Pull over and let me out," Piper answered immediately.

"Let me explain," Dean started.

"No," she cut him off before he could get more than a few words out. "There are certain statements that can be made better when they are followed with 'let me explain'. 'I murdered somebody' is no_t one of them_." Those hands that she seemed able to wreak such damage with were clenching into fists, and she had twisted so that she had them both pointed in Dean's direction like a pair of pistols.

"I didn't say that I murdered someone," Dean snapped back at her, feeling both offended and ridiculous at the same time. "I said that they think that I did."

"_Pull over_," Piper said again, almost shouting. "I swear, I can blow you straight out of the driver's door if you don't."

"You'll crash the car," Dean said in a milder tone than he felt, but put his foot to the brake and began pulling the car over to the side of the curb all the same.

"Wyatt, orb your brother," Piper ordered over her shoulder to Wyatt as soon as she felt the car starting to slow down.

"Piper-" Dean forgot to use her surname as he leaned over quickly and grabbed her by the forearm. She jerked back, stiffening, and Dean braced himself for her to let loose with that mojo again. It didn't come. That was something. Dean leaned back onto his side of the car again, holding up his hands. "Okay, sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

"Then maybe you shouldn't have confessed to murder," Piper said, but she wasn't jumping out of the car and running down the street yet. Probably because Wyatt in the backseat was still struggling with chubby fingers to let himself out of his car seat so that he could even reach his brother.

Dean rolled his eyes and made an irritated huffing sound before he could stop himself. "Lady, you need to work on your listening skills. I didn't do it. Try to keep up."

"The convenient shapeshifter." Though Piper's voice was dripping with sarcasm, she still hadn't moved. Dean was willing to consider that a victory.

He was just annoyed enough to flash her a devil-may-care smile and mean every inch of it. Using that smile again, Dean felt better than he had in a long time. "Why do I think that that's not such a stretch in your world?" Piper opened her mouth, closed it again, and gave him a suspicious eye. "Meanwhile, I know more than just about anyone else left on the planet about that demon that attacked your kids."

"Witch," Piper said automatically, but she didn't sound convinced.

Dean didn't roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. He still felt more like himself than he had in months. "I can help you. As I recall, I've already helped you. So I'm asking you to take a leap of faith here." These were the lines that Sammy was supposed to say, as he had the eyes on the trust-me vibe of the future lawyer to work for all that he was worth, and Dean felt faintly ridiculous saying them.

"On a murderer."

"We've already been over that."

"I don't trust you," Piper said. In the back seat, Wyatt had finally managed to let himself free from his car seat. Piper made a quick gesture for him to stay where he was. Dean thought of that as a victory.

Dean grinned at her again. She didn't look like she was buying it, but Dean thought that it was more for his benefit than it was for hers, like stretching out a muscle that had developed a cramp. "All I ask is that you trust my guns." A second later, he winced. "And ignore what a bad choice of words that was." When several more seconds went by and Piper still did not take the opportunity to jump out and run screaming down the street, Dean put his hand on the keys and started the car back up again. "Gonna blow me through the driver's door?"

"I'm still thinking about it," came Piper's wary response.

"Your face is going to freeze that way if you keep it up," Dean told her, and watched her scowl grow deeper. Hell, it was keeping his thoughts away from how narrowly he had let the demon get away from him at her apartment, and that was all that Dean asked.

Piper's directions did not take him to another apartment complex, but instead to a small, well-kept house on a nondescript street. Dean eyed it up and down and immediately began assessing what he would have to do in order to defend it. "Will you get Wyatt?" Piper asked as she unbuckled her seatbelt and let herself out of the car.

"You mean that you trust me not to slit his throat?" Dean asked as he did the same.

She flashed him a faux-bright smile, but the tension had bled out of her frame. "He's precocious."

Dean stared after her in bemusement as she ducked into the backseat so that she could release Chris. He was not aware of having been given any kind of Mama Bear test in the minutes that had passed between the 'Hello, I'm a murderer, but not really' conversation and pulling up the curb, but he must have passed. Or else, Wyatt really was just as powerful as Dean was beginning to suspect would be able to hurl Dean all the way across the street and through the trees in the neighbor's lawn if it crossed his mind.

Dean pulled a duffel bag full of the most important odds and ends in his collection from the car's trunk and threw it over his shoulder before he went to help Wyatt out of the backseat. Metal clinked against metal from inside the duffel bag as Dean shifted it into a more comfortable position. Wyatt listened avidly.

"What's in there?" he asked, pointing at the bag as Dean unhooked the seatbelt and hoisted him down to the ground. It was first time that Dean had heard him speak. He had been beginning to wonder if the kid was not mute.

'A hell of a lot of unpleasant things made for killing even worse things,' Dean thought, but did not say. He glanced over Wyatt's head and noticed that Piper was monitoring their conversation with great interest. Truth or not, that was still probably not something for a kid Wyatt's age, no matter how exceptional that kid might turn out to be. Had Dad been that blunt with him when he had started to ask questions? Possibly. Hell, _probably_. But Dean had also been a little bit older than Wyatt was now by the time that the shock had worn off and the eldest Winchester had begun to reshape himself into the underworld's newest bogey man.

"Tricks of my trade, little man," Dean answered. From across the top of the car, he saw Piper cock an eyebrow at him that was either amused or approving, or maybe even both. It was hard to keep a bead on her, as she had a tendency to get snappish at normal things and stay calm in the face of events that would send most people to rocking in the corner.

"My job is a little different than most people's," Dean continued. "I have to keep my tools with me all the time." Wyatt looked up at him, frowning, without responding. So they were going back to basics, then. Dean reached out to ruffle the kid's hair, but Wyatt was too quick for him. He ducked away and then ran up the walkway to the front door.

"I want to ring the doorbell!" Wyatt hollered.

"Wyatt, you get back here right now and stay close to me!" Piper yelled, causing Wyatt, Dean, and even Chris to all swivel around and stare at her. The shrill note that had entered her voice as she called her son's name was the closest to outright panic that Dean had heard from her yet. Piper noticed all of the eyes on her and pressed her lips into a line. "It isn't safe," she finished in a more normal tone of voice.

"Hey, man, don't you worry about it," Dean said to Wyatt as the kid slunk back to his mother's side and cast him a hurt look from beneath his lashes. "We probably don't even need a doorbell, as good at yelling as you are." The next look that Piper directed Dean's way was about as easy to decipher as the first, but Dean thought that there might even be a flash of gratitude mixed in there. Rather than being pleased, as most boys would be at being told that they were very good at making a great deal of noise, Wyatt retreated back into stubborn stoicism and stared at Dean without saying a word.

Sure enough, the front door opened before any of them could get near enough to ring the bell, permitting a tall, good-looking man to stand before them in drawstring pants and without the benefit of a shirt. He was no stranger to the inside of a gym, either, and did not care if the neighborhood knew it. Dean felt his eyebrows crawling upwards as he threw a glance Piper's way. As hard as she had snapped at him when he had brought up Leo, he had not figured her for the type.

'Now watch this guy turn out to be her brother,' Dean told himself, 'and you'll have to put the case on hold while you go and have a lobotomy.'

Though it was close to two in the afternoon, the man in the doorway had the tousled hair and wrinkled face suggesting that Wyatt's shout had pulled him from a deep sleep. He scrubbed his hand over his face before he asked in a disbelieving tone, "Piper?"

Piper winced. "Hi, Henry," she said. "Just in case you hadn't had enough of us, there's been an emergency."

Just like that, all of the sleep vanished from Henry's eyes, leaving a different man standing there from one moment to the next. This one looked as if he could do a lot more with his muscle than impress the pretty ladies at the gym. "Are the boys all right?" Henry asked immediately. He cast his gaze over Dean as he said it, searching the stranger for any sign that he might be a threat. Dean wasn't certain that he had passed by the time that Henry looked away, towards Piper again.

Piper had picked Chris up and was bracing him against one of her hips again. She reached out and tugged Wyatt quickly closer to her. Dean was not sure that she was even aware that she had made the gesture until it was done, but Wyatt began to squirm immediately. "They're fine," Piper replied. "The apartment didn't come out without a few black eyes, though, and it looks magical. Can we come in?"

"Sure." Henry stood to the side so that they could all pass. The inside of his house had definitely been decorated in bachelor chic, but it was clean and uncluttered. Dean immediately made note of all of the doors and windows as he set the duffel bag down on the nearest chair and began to go through it for the salt. Henry's eyes went flat between one second and the next as he watched, and Dean knew that he had not missed the gleam of gunmetal from inside.

"Easy, man," Dean said, waving him off. "None of them are loaded."

"Do you have licenses for them?" Henry asked, stepping closer so that he could peer into the depths of the bag. The jars, and the things floating around inside of the jars, were of particular interest to him before Dean zipped it closed again.

"They're unloaded," Dean repeated, flashing Henry his most winning smile. "Let's not get too bogged down in the other details." He lifted a can of salt and shook it for emphasis. "I'm going to salt down the doors and windows." Dean wasn't asking for permission, but he still experienced a moment of confusion where he did not know which of the adults that he ought to be addressing.

Piper frowned. "I know from demons," she said, though she still let a significant pause go by before she could bring herself to pronounce the word. 'I'll just bet that you do,' Dean thought. "I've never used salt to repel them before."

"Live and learn," Dean said. He glanced towards Wyatt. "Want to give me a hand, little man?"

Wyatt looked to Piper for permission. She nodded, though she beckoned him over to her first so that she could lean down and whisper something into his ear. Piper adjusted Chris back onto her hip and flashed Henry a wan smile as Wyatt ran back over to Dean. "Guess I owe you some explanations."

"One or two," Henry replied, glancing over at Dean again. He paused long enough to grab a shirt from the back of an armchair and pull it over his head before he led Piper away into the kitchen.

Dean took Wyatt over to Henry's front door and helped him flip the top up on the canister. "Just pour out a nice, steady line," he told him. "You don't need to dump out the entire thing in one place, but you don't want any breaks, either."

Wyatt wrapped both of his small hands around the canister so that he could hold it steady and did as he was told, his face as screwed up in concentration as if Dean was showing him how to dismantle a bomb. "This keeps the bad things out?" he asked Dean.

"Most of them." Dean reached out and corrected Wyatt's line, as it had broken when he looked up to wait for Dean's response. 'Not all of them. Not nearly enough.'

"Will it keep out the thing that tried to hurt my mommy?"

Wyatt was getting downright chatty. Dean hesitated for a long moment so that he could choose his words carefully. They had not known about salt and it's ability to hold off evil when his mother had been killed. The demon had already been inside the room, inside of his father, when he had begun to lay out the barriers during his last tangle with the monster. "I don't know," he said finally, deciding that the comforting lie would do so much more damage if he was wrong than would telling the unpleasant truth now.

Wyatt finished with the front door and gave the canister a thoughtful shake before he went to work on Henry's windows. He was a quick study, and Dean did not have to correct any mistakes again.

End Part Four


	5. Chapter 5

Part Five

"Live and learn." Dean turned and arched his eyebrows at Wyatt. "Want to give me a hand, little man?" Much like the nickname he had chosen, he spoke to Wyatt much more as he would an alarmingly short adult than a child. 'Not yet, he's not,' Piper thought. At the same time, she could see that Dean's refusal to talk down to Wyatt was winning the boy over in spite of any reservations that he might have had at first.

Wyatt even took a small step in Dean's direction before he remembered that he was supposed to ask for permission and glanced back at Piper. She nodded that he could, but first crooked her finger for him to come over to her. When he did, she knelt in front of him and whispered, "I know, I think that he's a good person, too. But if anything-_anything_-happens that makes you nervous, whether Dean does it or not, you orb straight back to me, okay?" Wyatt nodded his acceptance, and Piper kissed him on the cheek before she turned him loose. He immediately ran back over to Dean, who knelt down in front of Henry's front door while Wyatt leaned over his shoulder and watched intently. It looked to Piper as if they were doing nothing more complicated than opening a canister of salt, but she also knew of several potions that wouldn't look like anything more than exotic soup to the uneducated. If it kept that thing, be it Billie or something else entirely, out long enough for them to consider their next move then Piper would be satisfied.

There was always going to be a next move, Piper was coming to realize, whether she was wandering around in a fugue state or not. The least that she could do, for herself and for her boys, was to ready herself for it. Easier said than done, she thought, and felt her mouth quirk into a small and not entirely happy smile.

Piper shifted Chris into a more comfortable position on her hip as she straightened and turned to face Henry again. Chris was giving Henry a goggle-eyed stare from his position with his head draped across Piper's shoulder, when ordinarily Henry was one of his favorite people in the world. Piper dreaded the howls that would ensue when she finally did have to set him down again. "Guess I owe you some explanations," she said, struggling to smile and not entirely sure that her effort was a success.

"One or two." Henry glanced towards Dean again before he seemed to realize for the first time that he had answered his front door dressed in a pair of pants and nothing else. A faint flush crawled up his neck as he grabbed a spare shirt from the back of a chair and gestured Piper ahead of him into the kitchen. Piper took a seat at his table, looking around the room that she had cooked in almost as much as she had her own-as the _apartment's_, Piper amended crisply-over the course of the past year. The same efficiency and organization that Henry employed while he was at work carried over into his living spaces. Everything was neat and clean, everything had its place, even if maybe sometimes the colors did not quite match. A few pots of herbs that Piper ordinarily would have used in simple, basic potions were growing above his sink. Like most of the rest of her magic since her sisters had died, they were not doing so well. Piper glared at them for a moment while Henry crossed over to the other side of the table.

He was still adjusting the lower edges of his shirt as he took a seat across from Piper, and the flush that had crawled up the sides of his face did not look as if it was going to dissipate soon. If he was thinking of the poorly thought-out kiss that he had given Piper back at the house, well, that made two of them. Piper looked down, remembering the faintly and inescapably _male_ scent that she had not even realized that she had missed and that troubled her so much now that she was craving it again, and busied herself by teasing the largest of the tangles out of Chris's hair with her fingers.

"Is it a demon?" Henry might still be embarrassed, but he was shoving it to the side in order to deal with the more important matters at the moment. His eyes as he leaned across the table were clear and concerned.

'Of course not,' Piper almost said, before she realized that he was talking about the attack that had brought her here, not the man in the living room now. She blew out the air in her lungs on a sigh. "Maybe. Or Billie. I don't know." Henry wrinkled his brow at her. He wasn't used to seeing her so unraveled. Well, Piper was still getting used to _feeling_ so unraveled, so they made a matched pair. "It's complicated, but it might be possible that Billie's possessed." Which would then make it bad if Piper vanquished her so hard that there was nothing left to her but her constituent atoms. _Really_ bad. Something to remember, no matter how much she might still crave her revenge. A sour taste rose in the back of her throat, while Chris had begun to squirm in her lap. She noticed that Henry was looking at her blouse and said quickly, "It's nothing. Just a scratch." And it would have been a lot more than that if she had not gotten her wits back together and started firing with the big guns, but Henry did not need to know that.

Henry had gone rigid at the sound of Billie's name, and his eyes glittered in the same way that Piper was sure her must also be doing. Billie had taken Piper's sisters from her; she had taken Henry's wife from him. "Sure it's a demon?" he asked. Piper had an idea that he wanted it to be Billie working alone as much as she did. "What kind?"

Piper shook her head. "Ordinarily I would just check the Book of Shadows, but-" She found herself toying with Chris's hair again. "I don't smell like smoke because some incense got out of hand. There was a fire. Pretty…pretty much everything in the bedrooms was destroyed."

"No Book of Shadows," Henry finished for her in a low, shocked voice. To his credit, he shook it off quickly, or perhaps the entire notion of magic was still so new to him that he did not know how seriously a blow the loss of the Book had actually dealt them. He jerked his head towards the living room, where Dean and Wyatt were presumably still casting salt over all of the doors and windows. When he looked back at Piper, his eyes were dark and grave. She knew what Henry was going to ask before he even opened his mouth.

"Piper, how well do you know that guy?" Henry asked, hunching his shoulders so that he could lean further across the table. "Because right now…" He trailed off as if he was trying to figure out a way forward that would not offend her.

"Because I've been walking around in a fog for the past year?" Piper asked. "Because I can't make any magic that I have to think about actually work, and I don't know why? Because I'm leaving my child alone in a room with a man that I've only known for a few hours and that I met in the middle of a demon attack?" Her tone was as bright and gleaming as broken glass.

Henry leaned back in his chair and stared at her for a long moment before he finally answered. "Yeah. All of that."

"Dean's not a demon," Piper said crisply. She forced her hand back down to the table before she rendered her son bald. "For one thing, after eight years, I know from demons." Unless they were possibly Billie. "They're all horrible actors. And for another, I cast three different spells on him while the fire was being put out." They were clumsy things, the best that she could make up on the fly without a Book of Shadows and with dubious control over her own powers, but Dean had been so fixated upon keeping the cops from getting a clear look at his face that he had not noticed.

Henry relaxed, marginally. He was still giving Piper an uncertain, speculative look, as if he was being forced to question her judgment for the first time in a long time and did not enjoy the sensation in the slightest. "Demons are not the only evil things in the world," he pointed out gently.

Resting on the tabletop and wrapped protectively around her son's middle, both of Piper's hands clenched themselves into fists at once. "I know that," she said tightly. Once more, she saw blood spread out across the pavement in front of her and smeared across her hands as she tried desperately to do CPR, once more she saw Phoebe's lifeless body sprawled out across the scorched cement. Sending the abrupt change in atmosphere, Chris craned his neck so that he could look upwards and into her face.

"Then let me run a background check on him," Henry pushed forward in a gentle voice. "Just to see if any red flags pop up. The guy's carrying more than one gun in that bag of his, you owe it to your kids to find out if he has a history of using them."

Bringing Chris and Wyatt into it was a low blow. Piper thought that she would be much more irritated with him if she also didn't have the sneaking suspicion that he was right. She trusted Dean based upon little more than a five minute heart to heart on the side of the road and gut instinct, when all of her previous experiences should have had her vanquishing him first and then asking questions later. She had frozen the mail lady so many times over the past month that she was afraid that she was going to give the poor woman some obscure kind of brain cancer.

"His first name is Dean," Piper began. Oh, this story was _definitely_ going to be the one that convinced Henry that stress and grief had not driven her straight out of her mind, she could already tell. "I don't know his last name. Even if I did, running a background check on him would be pointless, because he's already told me that he didn't do what the police want him for."

Spoken out loud, it sounded even worse than it did in her head. Henry stared at her. He had been doing a lot of that since she had showed up again. "What, he has an evil twin problem?"

"Actually, it was a shapeshifter." Henry continued to stare at her. Piper made a huffing noise and felt a bit more like herself. "Look, I've actually been possessed before, okay? Paige came within ten minutes of being permanently turned into a vampire, we're going to be here all day if you want the full story of everything that Phoebe was ever turned into, and Leo died for the first time in World War II."

Henry flinched away very slightly when Piper mentioned Paige's name; she came within a hair's breadth of flinching herself when she was forced to bring up Leo. On some kind of cosmic calculus that Piper did not have the energy to work out right at the moment, she was pretty sure that that made them even. Henry leaned back in his chair and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, okay." He paused to consider for a moment and then said, "Shapeshifters? _Really_?" Every time that Henry learned something new about the aspect of the world that lurked beyond the sight of normal people, he adopted the tone of a kid realizing that he really could bring Tinker Bell back to life by clapping hard enough.

Piper made an impatient gesture with her free hand. "The point is, I've learned not to dismiss a story out of hand just because it sounds a little crazy. You're going to have to trust me here, Henry. There are a lot of things that I'm willing to do now that I never would have thought of when I first learned about my powers and about magic, but letting either one of my boys walk into danger is not one of them." She paused when she was finished, her breathing coming slightly faster than normal. Trust did not come easily to her any longer; she was not certain why it was coming so easily to her now, and hoped that it was not a by-product of a slick smile and nice set of shoulders. _It couldn't be._ And yet, after the incident with Henry in the bathroom, she could not be sure. Piper was almost glad that she did not have Leo's photograph with her, so that she did not have to look at it and face this strange blend of confusion and guilt at the same time.

Henry did not look convinced. Piper did not know what aspect of her story it was, exactly, that was leaving him so unsatisfied, and was not sure that she even wanted to. Neither did he have the time to protest, though, as Dean and Wyatt came into the kitchen, announcing their arrival with a loud stomping of boots across the linoleum. Piper had an idea that Dean was deliberately making a lot of noise so that they would have time to change the topic of their conversation gracefully. He had moved as silently as the smoke itself while they were fleeing from the apartment earlier.

Sure enough, Dean asked jovially, "Do I pass?"

"Probationary status," Piper answered, watching as Dean walked over to the window above the sink and began to pull down her plants. Wyatt followed him as obediently as if he was a puppy and Dean held the other end of his string in his hand.

"I've got this one," Dean said. He took the canister from Wyatt and, seeming to miss the way that the boy followed his every move with his eyes, shook the last of the salt out in a line across Henry's windowsill. That done, Dean pulled a small bottle of what Piper presumed to be olive oil from his jacket pocket and dabbed a bit of it on each corner of the window's frame. Her guess was confirmed when Henry's kitchen began to smell just slightly like an Italian restaurant.

Dean stepped back and surveyed his work as he slide the bottle back into his pocket. "It's not perfect, but it'll hold," he said. Dean reached out and ruffled Wyatt's hair. "Couldn't have done it without you." Wyatt, who rarely even allowed Henry to touch him and only accepted real affection from Piper these days, stood stock-still and blinked at Dean solemnly as he drew his hand back and turned back towards the table. Piper did not know what to say.

Dean threw himself down into one of the remaining chairs. Wyatt hovered for a moment between the table and the kitchen door, saw that Piper's lap was already occupied, and wound up pulling himself into the final unoccupied chair. He sat ramrod straight like the miniature soldier that he was far too young to be modeling his behavior after and eyed them all with an expressionless face. Piper stared across the table at Henry, who gazed back at her with eyes every bit as wide as she knew her own must be. There had been a few seconds when she would not have been surprised to see Wyatt climb up into Dean's lap.

Dean did not seem to notice any of the unspoken communication that was going on around him. For perhaps only the second or third time since Piper had met him, there was no charming smile just waiting for the right opportunity to flash across his face. "If we're done with the secret tribunal, then we might as well figure out where we stand," he said to her. "The protections that I've put around the doors and windows will keep out just about anything that decides to come at you while you stay here." Pain flickered across Dean's face before he banished it again. Piper could not hope to figure out what it meant before every trace of it was gone. "But unless you want to spend the rest of your life hiding in your friend's house, then the only way that you're ever going to be free of his son of a bitch is if we kill it." Wyatt perked up in his chair and began swinging his feet rapidly back and forth. Piper could not be sure if this was due to Dean's words, or the note of savagery that had entered his voice as he said them.

Rather than rebuking Dean for swearing in front of little pitchers with very big ears, Piper thought very hard for a moment before she said, "Piper."

Dean looked startled. "I'm sorry?"

"Piper," she repeated. "It's my first name." She steadfastly ignored the look that Henry was flashing her from the other side of the table. "You can't be more than five or six years younger than me. It makes me feel old and doddering, and that's the last thing that I need to be right now."

"Piper." Dean repeated her name as if Piper was giving him a gift by trusting him with it. Given the nastier aspects of a few demons that Piper could name, he might be right. "Okay, like I was saying, the only way that we're going to stop this thing-"

"Who are you?" Henry interrupted. As Dean broke off and stared at him, he continued, "You show up at the same time that this thing does, saying that you want to help, and somehow Piper trusts you immediately. No offense, Piper, but that's not like you enough to make me suspicious." Piper shrugged, as it was so close to the path that her own thoughts had been taking only a few moments before that she could not really argue. "And you've managed to work your way into the house and put up a bunch of sigils that I've never seen before." The corners of Henry's mouth pulled down briefly before he went on. "That might not have meant much a year ago, but I've gotten a bit of a crash course in all things magical over the past year or so."

Dean went rigid and alert in his chair from the moment that Piper had begun to speak. So much so, in fact, that professed trust or not, Piper unwrapped her hand from around Chris's midsection and laid it down on the table so that it was plainly visible. Rather than fussing as had been his tendency over the past several hours, Chris sat quietly and instead watched Wyatt for clues as to what he should do. Wyatt watched Dean.

"So how does it work, Dean?" Henry went on. "Do you want us to believe that it was just a coincidence that you were there when Piper needed help? And will it be a coincidence if you're there the next time that Billie attacks, too?"

Dean flashed Henry the kind of tight, glittering smile that was never more than an excuse to bare the teeth. He had folded his arms over his chest in a defensive gesture. Piper did not think that he even realized he was doing it. "Wasn't a coincidence," he said. "Hate to push the pin into your conspiracy theory, Hank, but I never claimed coincidence here. I've been hunting this demon for a very long time. I was tipped off by a friend of mine that it would be settling down in the West Coast. Piper's family seems to be one-stop shopping for every unexplained phenomenon that rolls through California and doesn't stop in Los Angeles first, and that's just everything that makes it into the papers." Dean paused for a moment so that he could shrug. He was still wearing the 'fuck you' smile, and if anything had even turned it up a notch. "You keeping up with our story so far?" He didn't wait for anyone at the table to answer before he pushed on. "Good. I got a phone call while I was at the old house site-"

"You were the creepy guy?" Henry interrupted him again. He swiveled his head around to look at Piper as if he doubted her sanity more and more with every second that passed. Piper almost expected him to reach over and pluck Chris from her arms for his own well-being in the next few seconds. Henry might be family at this point, but Piper was still pretty sure that she would have to smack him one if he tried that. "You never said that he was the creepy guy."

"You called me creepy?" Dean almost looked hurt.

Piper sighed and pinched at the bridge of her nose, as the epicenter of what promised to be one hell of a headache was already settling in directly behind her eyes. She was amazed that it had taken that long. "You're still the creepy guy, Dean, you're just our creepy guy now." There was something subtly wrong about that phrasing. Piper frowned for a moment before she decided to let it go. "Whatever. Go on."

"I ran into a pair of ghosts, one less than friendly, one _more_ than friendly enough to make up for her friend-"

Pair. Plural. "Wait a minute," Piper said suddenly, waving her hands at Dean to halt him, just in case the urgency in her voice was not enough to clue him in. He sighed and did so, looking none the happier at being interrupted yet again. She glanced over the table to see that Henry was matching her stare for wide-eyed stare. "You said that there were _two_ ghosts?"

"Ye-es." Dean nearly sing-songed the word, and now it was his turn to arch his eyebrows at Piper as if she had taken her brain out of her head and set it down on the table for all to behold. "Newspaper said that three died in the explosion. Anyway, one of them, at least, has _got_ to be exorcised. Bitch nearly cut my head off."

"Language," Piper said automatically before she shook her head and pinched at the bridge of her nose again. "No, back up. The second ghost, the less than evil one, what did she _do_?"

Dean's ears turned faintly pink before he put his rakish grin back into place again. "Pretty sure that she was hitting on me." Heaven help them all, he actually sounded proud. "Which is a first even for me, hard as that may be to believe."

Henry had perked up in his chair at the first mention of a second ghost, only to deflate back into his chair upon hearing that she had turned amorous attentions onto Dean. "Phoebe," Piper breathed in a voice so low that she doubted anyone else was even able to hear her. It had to be. But…and Piper felt a line drawing itself down between her eyes. She had been to the manor site dozens of times since her sisters had died, perhaps even more than one hundred, and she had never felt even a whisper of Phoebe's or Piper's presences. Christy, sure, had no problem, making herself known, but the ones that Piper had repeatedly tried to feel…and for Phoebe to go and show herself to a _stranger_…

"You're sure that felt a second ghost there?" Piper demanded.

Dean leveled her a look suggesting that he had come to expect better of her in the short time that he had known her and was disappointed that she was failing him now. When he had faced down everything that she had, then he could question her skepticism. Piper arched her eyebrows, tried to calm her thundering heart, and waited until Dean replied, "I think I know when a pretty woman is hitting on me." He held up his hand. "In my mind, she's pretty. Don't correct me if I'm wrong."

"She is," Piper said softly. She cleared her throat. "She was." At the same time, Henry demanded, "Did you feel a third ghost there?" while Piper pressed, "It still could have been Christy playing with you, you don't know."

Rather than looking irritated by the fact that they were continuing to second-guess him, Dean's expression was tired and sad. "No, man, I'm sorry," he said to Henry. Given the tone that Henry had been using to question him just moments before, Piper did not expect that the apology would sound sincere, but it did. "And, look, Piper, I'm not some John Edwards wannabe running around the country chasing after spooky stories in the newspapers, okay? I do actually know what to do when I find them, and I know how to tell one ghost from the other. Whatever your beef is that your sisters have been feeling so shy until now, that's your problem with them." Dean looked at them each in turn. "Can we get back to the demon now?"

If he had noticed the way that Piper had sucked in her breath sharply between her teeth and had gone rigid at his casual dismissal of Phoebe, then he was wise enough not to mention it. More likely, Piper thought in a sour, uncharitable moment, he just did not care. There was a part of her that, when properly agitated, could instantly become small and mean, and knew how to deliver acid with a smile. "There's no demon," she told Dean sweetly, a part of her even enjoying the way that his eyes went flat. Good. He probably had no siblings and no concept of what he had done by suggesting that Phoebe's ghost couldn't show herself to Piper purely because she could not be bothered. "I'm sorry, but your vision quest must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. This is just a witch with a grudge. Don't think that I'm not grateful for your help, but I'm pretty sure that from here on out I can deal with her myself." Never mind the problems that she had been having. In that small, mean space, Piper was certain that they would all fall away as soon as she felt the pulse stop beating in Billie's neck.

Dean's eyes were flatter still by the time that she had finished. They were made for flirtation and happiness, and it was strange to see them so cold now. "You're wrong," he said, snapping his teeth shut around each word as if he was making weapons for later use.

"I think that I know a little something about demons by now," Piper said. "You still haven't given me any good reason not to believe that it's Billie." Because Billie was a lot of things, Piper's brain wouldn't allow her to ignore, but she had not become violent until she was prodded there by Christy, and she had faded out of sight as soon as Christy was dead. It was beyond out of character that she would attack Piper or, more importantly, Piper's boys now, it was enough to beggar belief. 'But I need it to be real.'

"I've been fighting them since I was four. I think that I know a little something, too." Dean was still speaking in that strange, clipped-off way, as if it was all that he could do to keep himself under control. "This demon has attacked people before, and it always attacks in exactly the same way-exactly the way that it came after you. We've managed to save the mother a grand total of once now, including you." 'We.' The bitchy part of Piper woke up even further and began to stretch. "This witch that you saw in your son's room was possessed-"

"Billie was _not_ possessed," Piper snarled. "Just because you say so-" 'Because she _can't_ be, that bimbo does not get to make any more excuses for what she's done, she has to be held responsible for what she's taken from me-'

"Why can't she be?" Dean threw back at her. "Because _you_ say so?" He was still powerfully angry, but he looked as if he was beginning to calm down. Damn, that was going to make what Piper was about to do next a shame. "No offense, Piper, but this about a little more than your revenge."

"Is it so different for you?" Piper asked waspishly instead. Her hands on the table were clenched into fists. Chris on her lap had swiveled his head around so that he could look at her with wide eyes. "I don't see any 'we' here unless you have an invisible buddy that you're not telling us about. Don't lecture me about revenge, Dean. Not while you have it written all over you."

She might as well have just reached over the table and casually punched him, for she would have gotten the same reaction. "You," Dean began, and actually started to rise from his chair.

"_Enough_." Henry could make gang members on the verge of throwing away their second chances sit down, shut up, and listen to him with nothing more than the sound of his voice. Dean and Piper both were rendered into silence by the way that he cracked it across the table now. Piper looked over at him and realized that, while Dean had only begun to lunge up to his feet, Henry had gotten there. She had been so caught up in the person on the other side of the table that she had not even noticed the one beside her. Henry stared at each one of them in turn before he spoke. "There are two small boys in this room. If the fact that they're learning from you is not enough, then think about how they've already come damned close to losing their mother once today." Piper pulled back in her chair, shocked. While she had known Henry to swear on occasion when the two of them were alone, he also knew how she was about language in front of the boys and had not slipped once that she knew of. Rather than glaring at Dean as she had expected him to, Henry instead turned the laser stare onto Piper. "So maybe you ought to listen before this thing gets it right."

Piper leaned back further in her seat. Dean, she noted, appeared every bit as shocked by Henry's choice of attack as she felt. He turned his head quickly and coughed into his hand to cover it. Piper could still see a bright flush of emotion crawling up the sides of Dean's neck. For her part, Piper took several long, deep breaths until the roaring in her ears had subsided and said, "Billie's possessed. Okay." There, that was not so bad. Or it was, but she would learn to cope with it. "What else do you know about the demon that's supposed to be in her?"

For every breath that Piper took to calm herself down again, Dean did the same, until he finally said, "It _does_ possess people. I've seen it at work. Probably it went after your witch in the first place because she knows you and because it wanted to add her powers to its own." 'She's not mine,' Piper wanted to say, and barely managed to restrain herself. Dean was staring down at his hands where he had them splayed over the tabletop, his eyebrows drawn together until they created a harsh slash running between his eyes. "The demon is after kids. Near as we can tell, he's only interested in kids with abilities that make them just a tiny bit different from the normal soccer and juice box set. Psychics, telekinetics, people like that."

Dean took in both Chris and Wyatt at a glance, and Piper knew what he must be thinking even if he did not know the full story behind the boys' parentage. That was all right; a few more details on this demon, and Piper would be more than happy to fill in those blanks for him. After whetting its appetite on Seers and telekinetics, the sons of a Charmed One and a Whitelighter must be making the demon salivate. Piper drew Chris closer to her chest without realizing what she was doing.

"It goes into the kid's room," Dean went on. "It drags the mother up to the ceiling and guts her so that her blood can fall down onto the baby." Piper put her hand against her stomach as she realized just how close she had come to dying hours earlier. Dean broke off long enough to flash her a grim smile. "Yeah. It's not about puppies and roses." Piper did not think that he would have shared this much detail with anyone else. She had pissed him off, and now he was trying to scare her a little. She arched one of her eyebrows and waited for him to continue. "Then it lights the room on fire, the mother dies, and the kid keeps growing until it can take its place as a member of the Addams Family." Dean snapped his fingers twice sarcastically before he made a face. "Actually, we-_I_-don't know what happens after that. Whatever the demon has been planning for these kids, it hasn't had a chance to put it into motion yet. Given that it's an all around nasty son of a bitch, though, I don't think that it's going to be giving them college scholarships."

Piper had watched Dean's face closely while he spoke. "So what's wrong?" she asked.

Dean finally stopped staring at his own hands as if he could pull all of the secrets of the universe in the lines in his knuckles by glaring at them long enough. "Did you think that I was telling you a fairytale just then?" he asked her. "This monster is going to kill you and probably brainwash one of your kids into a starring role in the apocalypse, that's what's wrong."

Piper made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "Besides that," she said, and smiled thinly. "Enough people try to kill you, eventually stop running around in circles every time that a new one pops up. You looked confused when you were talking about my kids. Why?"

The change in expression that Piper had seen was swift and quickly masked. Dean looked surprised and even a little impressed that Piper had caught it at all. He nodded once and pursed his lips for a moment before he flashed her a rueful grin. It only lasted a moment before he became solemn again. "They're too old," he said. "Every other kid was attacked when it was exactly six months old. I can't figure out why yours weren't." Dean looked frustrated. Piper did not imagine that he ran into problems that he could not barrel over through force or charm all that often.

'The Charmed Ones were alive when both of the boys reached their six-month birthday,' Piper thought. The remaining third must not be nearly so threatening, and she did not think that there were going to be any more long lost half-sisters dropping from the sky to help her this time around. Piper sucked her lower lip into her mouth and worked at it with her teeth as she thought. She was still a powerful witch, or should be, whether she had her sisters or even a complete Book of Shadows at her side or not. She would beat this demon down by the pure force of her will if that was what it ultimately came down to, because nothing, _nothing_ was going to touch the family that she had left. Piper might still have her magic, but magic had not helped her protect her sisters, or protect Leo. She would do it running on nothing else than mother-love.

If only.

"We'll need a spell," Piper said slowly, half to herself, rather than answering Dean's question. It had been a long time since she had written one, even before she took into account her recent issues. She could only hope that it would be more like riding a bike than it was like calculus.

"We'll need a bullet," Dean answered her immediately, and then winced. "That I don't have, _damnit_. There's a gun that can kill the demon, but it was taken from me when I had my unfortunate run-in with the boys in blue."

"Don't swear around my kids," Piper responded automatically, glad that her blood pressure had at least come down far enough for her to notice, at the same time that Henry asked, "Where is it, then?"

Dean stared at him until Henry said, "Piper's already told me about your problems with the law. I might still be able to help." Dean rattled off a precinct as if he had been thinking about it for months. If the gun was as important as his brief description made it sound, then he probably had. Henry's lips moved as he memorized it before stood and reached to take Chris from Piper's arms. Chris held out his hands eagerly to be picked up; it was Piper who had trouble letting go. She dropped a kiss onto the top of his head first, inhaling the soft baby smell that he had still not entirely lost. Piper loved that smell, and had mourned when Wyatt had finally grown out of it. She would always associate it with youth and innocence.

There was something out there that wanted to take that and…do what with it? Twist it in some way, pervert it, of that much she was certain. Make another Christy, maybe even another Cole. And use her blood to do it.

Reluctantly, Piper allowed Chris to be pulled from her arms. Henry shifted the boy onto his hip and then held out his other hand to Wyatt. Wyatt looked first at Piper, then at Dean, almost as if he was searching for approval, before he took Henry's hand and allowed himself to pulled from his seat. "Come on, guys, I have a DVD for the two of you to watch," Henry said. "The adults have a lot left to do."

"Thank you," Piper said to him before she crooked up the corner of her mouth into a half-hearted smile. "So much for your day off."

"You're family," Henry replied before he led Chris and Wyatt from the kitchen. "That settles it."

The kitchen rang with silence after Henry left. Piper stared down at her interlaced hands on the table before she looked back up at Dean, feeling shy in a way that she had not for a very long time. Apologizing to a near stranger was different from apologizing to one of her sisters. With Paige or Phoebe, even if she said the wrong thing at first, she knew that they would all stumble their way to the end eventually.

"I'm sorry," Piper said finally, deciding ultimately to rip off the bandage quickly and not play around with it. Dean came back from whatever far-off place that he had been wandering around in his own head and blinked at her. "You're reasons for hunting this thing are your own. I have no right to pry."

Dean barked out a short laugh that almost, but not quite, sounded real. "Yeah, well, I'm told that sometimes I need a kick in the ass like that." For a second, the distant look was back, and Piper could not help but notice all over again that he was alone. Whoever it was who had done his ass-kicking for him beforehand, they were long gone now. That probably explained a good chunk of his zeal to hunt this monster down and into the ground. "Look, I know this is none of my business, so don't answer if you don't want to, but this Billie person? Is she the one who killed your husband?"

Piper was regretting now that she had not pushed him harder about his connection to the demon, since he seemed to have no problem turning the tables on her. "No," Piper said, knowing that her face was not friendly. "Billie is only responsible for my sisters, as I'm sure that your copious amounts of research has told you."

Dean was beginning to look embarrassed and as if he was regretting opening up the line of conversation at all. "I never was the bookworm type," he muttered.

"Leo was hit by a car," Piper continued. She did not need to see herself in the mirror to know that there was a bitter twist to her mouth. She could feel it, making her face ache. "A hit and run. Drunk driver, probably. We were…things were promised, and not delivered. I'm not the biggest fan of my own magic these days." Since it had been a full year and she had not even tried to start rebuilding the manor yet, that could be a bit of an understatement.

Dean tilted his head back and watched her as she pushed herself back from the table and went over to Henry's kitchen sink so that she could turn on the tap. Her skin still felt gritty with soot, and her hair smelled worse than it had on any of the most packed nights within the club. She guessed that she could shower, if she didn't mind changing right back into the same smoky clothing, but it was everything that she could do to let the boys so much as leave the room without her at their sides. The thought of being unable to hear them over the running water if they needed her was almost enough to send her into a cold sweat. Piper splashed water across her face instead and felt a few drops slide down the back of her neck, sticking her hair to the skin, before she began searching Henry's kitchen drawers for a rubber band.

"I've never been a fan of it at all," Dean said from behind Piper before he realized that this was perhaps not the best thing to say to a witch. "No offense."

"None taken," Piper said dryly as she finally found a rubbed band and turned back around. She toyed with the damp strands of her hair for a moment before she swept it quickly up into a ponytail, and ended her hesitation by putting her hand down on Dean's shoulder and squeezing for a moment. If Dean seemed shocked by the gesture, then he was not the only one. Piper could hardly believe in what she was doing herself as she squeezed at Dean's shoulder again and said, "It probably didn't come through very well, what with all the yelling, but I am grateful for what you've done for us."

"I'm not a stranger to the yelling, trust me," Dean said, his voice strangely gruff. "Like water from a duck's back." He hesitated for nearly as long as Piper had before he finally brought his hand up to cover Piper's own. Dean's skin was warm, and Piper could feel every callus in his palm pressing into the back of her hand. "And don't worry about thanking me, either. It's part of the family business."

End Part Five


	6. Chapter 6

Part Six

The day was pushing into sunset and the boys were on their second DVD before Henry got off of the phone and rejoined Piper and Dean. He scrubbed his hand over his face, then across the back of his neck, and stared down at the floor for a long moment without saying a word.

"What happened?" Piper asked eagerly. Dean didn't see the need. John Winchester had been a believer in reading the victim as much or more than reading the demon, as so often the victims were being less than forthcoming with their own involvement in dark magic and the like. Dean, eager student that he was, had watched every move that his father had made. If there was a single thing that Henry was broadcasting now, it was defeat.

Henry met Piper's eyes and winced. "No go," he said, shaking his head. "If I was an actual detective, I might be able to come up with a good lie, but as a parole officer…" Henry shrugged and snorted. "As it turns out, evidence tampering is a felony. What do you know?"

Beside him, Dean watched as Piper subtly deflated back into the couch. "Magic, then," she said in the tones of someone who had just been told that the minor mole on her back was in fact not so minor at all. She pushed herself to her feet. "I'll start working on a spell."

"Isn't this usually a Power of Three thing?" Henry asked her.

Piper managed to look scared, frazzled, and stubborn all at once. "It'll be a Power of One thing," she said, inclining her head to check on Wyatt and Chris where they were paying rapt attention to the latest adventures of Sponge Bob Squarepants. "I'll make it one. Got a notepad that I can borrow?"

"Sure." Henry arched his eyebrows at Dean before he led Piper away, as if asking if he could manage to stay out of trouble for that long.

"Think I got it covered, buddy." Dean pointed to the disturbingly yellow little man who was cavorting under the sea with his friends. Chris let out a high-pitched giggle, and Wyatt gave him a look of long-suffering disbelief so similar to the ones that Dean had once given Sam that he felt his throat closing up for a moment. "I can't wait to see how this one ends."

Henry's eyebrows only went up higher. "_Murder_?" he asked Dean. His tone suggested that a good answer had better be forthcoming.

Dean flashed him the easy smile that only seemed to fail when he turned it onto Piper Halliwell. "Mistaken identity."

If Henry's tone had told Dean that his answer had better be a damned good one, then his expression said that that was not a good example. "You have no idea how many people say that to me," Henry said flatly.

"And in my case it's true." Dean nodded to where Piper was busily going through Henry's drawers again, apparently looking for a pen. "But I'm sure that she's already filled you in."

Henry had turned to watch Piper also, his tone becoming softer and more protective for a moment. "For whatever reason, she trusts you," he said as he turned back. "Don't fuck it up."

Dean watched as Piper's shoulders twitched, as if she could sense obscenities being said within a fifty-foot radius of her kids even when she herself was not within hearing distance. He tired the grin again, to roughly the same effect. Okay, so Piper Halliwell, and Henry. "I'll keep that in mind," he said as Henry finally left him alone.

Dean glanced out of Henry's living room window and made note of the deepening twilight. The demon would likely attack again shortly after night fell, and they were running out of fresh houses to shuttle to. Dean had better have a plan in place by then, or else the situation was likely to come to a grim and grisly end, like so many other families before it. Though Piper had insisted over and over again that she had been nothing more than scratched by the earlier attack, Dean had still seen her wince and place her hand against her stomach repeatedly.

He needed the Colt, Dean thought stubbornly, remembering the way that his father's eyes had turned gold, the way that the headlights had filled up his entire world before it had exploded into pain. It was not until he felt a sharp, stabbing sensation in the palms of his hands and glanced down that he realized how tightly he was clenching his hands into fists, until he was on the verge of cutting the flesh open. He needed the gun so that he could end this, finally, so that he could bury it as surely as he had buried the corpses of many other nasty things over the years, and rest knowing that there would be no more Maxes or Sams made. Rest knowing that this sour taste of bile in the back of his throat, this buzzing thirst for revenge in his head, could finally be quenched.

Gee, and that would all be so much easier if the gun was not one thousand miles away and in a police precinct that knew his face far better than he was comfortable with. That left him trying to work with a trunk full of rock salt and a witch with self-image problems.

"Magic," Dean muttered in a tone of deep disgust. Something else that he could neither touch nor see, though he still had the deep scratches on the side of his neck to tell him all about the danger of things that he could not see. He sighed and pulled his cell phone from his pocket, dialing in a number quickly before he raised the phone to his ear.

Missouri answered on the first ring. "What is it, sugar?" she asked.

Dean pulled the phone away from his ear so that he could give it a look of surprise and deep suspicion before he put it back and asked, "Did you know that I was going to call?"

Missouri made a huffing noise that managed somehow to let Dean know exactly what her expression was, even though he could not see it. "Boy, do you think that I spend all day waving my hands over a crystal ball?" she demanded. "I got Caller ID years ago. What do you need?"

Dean let the silence gather until Missouri made another huffing noise, perhaps thinking that the line had been disconnected or that Dean was deliberately ignoring her. "It's about my dad," he said, and then swore beneath his breath to hear the shake that he could still not control even now.

"That mouth is going to get you in trouble that it won't be able to get you back out of again, mark my words," Missouri said, her tone gentle. "And I had a feeling that it would be."

"More psychic wonder games?" Dean asked dryly.

"Dean Winchester, just because your brother put up with that crap does not mean that I'm going to." Dean had gotten himself into the habit of not thinking about Sam unless he was forced into it. Even thinking about Dad for a prolonged period of time was giving him a throbbing head and making him see why Dad had sometimes drank a shade more than was healthy. "It's common sense."

"How often did my dad call you to talk shop?" Dean got right to the point, hearing a brusque note in his voice. He sounded as if he was on the verge of shattering altogether.

Either Missouri heard that note, or she was using some of her psychic wonder abilities, after all. Her voice was gentle as she said, "Close to every week at first, less as the years went by and he found his feet. Why do you want to know?"

"Did he ever talk to you about the demon?" Dean asked. There was no need to specify which demon he was talking about.

"All the time, sugar." Missouri's voice was soft, gentle. Dean almost wished that she would snap at him again. "What do you need to know?"

"Did he ever mention another way to stop the demon, something that doesn't need the Colt?" Dean asked. When the only sound on the other end of the line was that of Missouri's quiet breathing, he once again heard that trace of panic in his own voice. "Look, Missouri, I have no gun and no journal, so I'm pretty much throwing myself on your mercy here…" It hurt to say that, but the last year had hurt a lot more.

"I head you, Dean," Missouri told him. "No. He talked about that demon close to every time that we talked-sometimes it was _all_ that he talked about-but all he ever did was pin his hopes onto that gun."

Dean swore again, not even bothering this time to keep it under his breath. Missouri said his name sharply. "Yeah, language. You're as bad as Piper."

From the other end of the line came the sound of Missouri's deep, reverberating sigh. "As if I wouldn't be able to hear you thinking it, anyway." There was a long beat of silence in which Dean struggled with the question that had been tugging at him all day, unable to quite bring himself to voice it aloud. "Anytime, Dean, don't even worry about it. We can talk shop, or we can talk about your dad. Anything that you want to."

"Thanks," Dean said gruffly before he hung up the phone. Glancing up, he saw that Piper had gone back into the kitchen and taken a seat at Henry's table. She was writing furiously on the notepad that Henry had loaned her, pausing to glare at what she had written, scratching it out again almost as quickly. Dean would not be surprised to see sweat break out along her hairline next.

"No Colt, and a neurotic witch," Dean muttered to himself. "Oh, yeah, this is going to turn out _great_." He did not allow himself to dwell on the thought that really wanted to dig in and take root, the one which said that if he had still been with Dad or Sam and at the top of the game he never would have left the Colt behind, never mind that Dean had been sick with grief and frequently still reeling with pain. Sam would have found a way to sneak it back out again. When the thought refused to retreat on its own, Dean shut it down with a speed and ruthlessness that surprised him before he threw it out of his mind altogether. It was not until he tasted flakes of enamel on his tongue that he realized that he might out to relax his jaw before he wound up snapping all of his teeth off at the gum. Dean shoved the phone back into the pocket of his jacket and rubbed at his eyes, sighing. Best that he could figure, his options were either to hope that Piper's mojo was real enough and strong enough to do the job, and that she could get herself together long enough to actually get it pointed in the right direction, or to cram everyone into the car and head east to take the gun back himself. With the way that things were going so far, he would wake up from a catnap to find out that the demon could pin people to the roofs of cars, too.

Something tugged at the hem of Dean's jacket. He jumped, and his hand even curled into a fist before he managed to get himself back under control again. Turning to see what it was that had startled him, Dean let out a huffing sound that still did not come anywhere near to being a laugh. "Little man," he sighed, forcing his fist to uncurl, "this is really not a good night to be creeping up on people."

Wyatt stared up at Dean with big, solemn eyes and still did not release his grip on Dean's jacket. Puppyish infatuation with Dean or not, Dean still had to admit that Piper's oldest had a creepy-ass stare on him. Chris was still engrossed in the castle under the sea, not paying any attention to where his brother had gone. He was still young enough to shrug this night off without too much injury. Wyatt was another matter altogether.

"My mommy says that guns are bad," Wyatt told Dean in a monotone. He released Dean's jacket at last and dropped his hand back to his side, where he began to clench and unclench it into spasmodic fists. It was the only sign of emotion that he showed, for his face remained as blank as a china doll's.

Yeah. Cute kid all around, and Dean was growing fond of him in spite of himself, but _creepy_.

"Your mommy is a smart lady," Dean replied distractedly before he reached out and ruffled Wyatt's hair again. "I can show you more tricks for fighting demons later, okay? Right now I'm busy." Trying to conjure a plan out of thin air.

Wyatt neither leaned into Dean's hand nor pulled further away. "Can that gun kill the thing that tried to hurt her?" he asked.

"Yeah, should," Dean said, barely glancing at Wyatt at he pulled his hand back. Sam would come up with a plan, so he needed to think like Sam. College boy Dean might not be, but he was still a damned long way from stupid. "We don't have that gun, though, so there's no point in kicking ourselves around about it." Dean could picture every detail of the hospital, every detail of the town in his mind, seeming so close and yet so far away.

"I can see it," Wyatt said abruptly before he reached out, grabbed Dean's wrist, and gripped it tight. For a young boy, he was surprisingly strong.

"What the hell?" Dean asked, only to shut his mouth abruptly as he felt a sharp tugging sensation beginning from behind his navel. He gasped and swore. Wyatt's hand only tightened in response, and a blue haze began to fill Dean's vision. He heard Piper shout, though her voice sounded as if it was coming from a great distance away, and the haze was so thick that he could not see where she was. The tugging increased, Dean's feet left the ground-

-and after several whooshing seconds in which he could not say where he was, what he was touching, or even if he was still breathing at all, he felt his boots come down on something solid again. Dean stumbled once and caught himself, instinctively drawing Wyatt closer against him so that Dean could protect him. He shook his head as the last of the brilliant blue faded from his vision, like shaking off the afterimage from flash photography. When he was able to see again, his jaw dropped.

"Little man," Dean said, "your whole family is something else, do you know that?" He had made swift tracks to get his ass out of town after leaving the hospital. Didn't mean that he couldn't tell exactly which precinct he was standing in now. It appeared largely deserted, though when he focused he could still hear voices from further down the hall. A few jackets were draped across chairs, a few cups of coffee were still sitting out on desks, steam curling from their tops, while a country singer on the radio wanted Dean to know that he didn't know who was cheating who, who was being true, and who didn't even care anymore.

Wyatt's only response was to tighten his grip on Dean's hand and shrink even further against his side. Yeah, the kid was plenty brave when was teleporting Dean onto cross-country jaunts, not so much when they actually reached their destination. Dean clenched his jaw until he felt a muscle in his cheek begin to jump and squeezed Wyatt's hand back. Incredibly, he felt the kid relax even further against him. Four year-olds had a strange sense of courage. "Lucky for you, I'm not the kind that's going to look a gift Colt in the mouth." The idea that it could be over, that he could finally have the satisfaction of putting a bullet into the demon's head, was intoxicating.

While Dean had never been in this particular police station, he had spoken to enough of its officers to get a pretty good idea of what he could expect if he ever entered the building, and was delighted to note that it filled all of his most vicious daydreams. As long as he got his gun back, the fine citizens of this little backwater could hold their police proceedings in a basement and their city council meetings in an attic for all that he cared.

"Good boy," Dean murmured as they began to creep forward. "Good, good boy." Wyatt looked pleased by this particular bit of praise, so much so that he might even commit what was, for him, the audaciously rambunctious act of even smiling. _Weird_ kid, Dean thought, not without fondness. Someone really ought to talk to Piper about that. So long as he could help Dean get his gun back, though, Dean would happily take him to every baseball game and show him how to kill every supernatural beastie that his heart desired. Along the way, he might even remember what it was like to have fun doing it.

"What in the hell are the two of you doing in here?" Wyatt jumped at the sound of the voice and then shrank closer against Dean, as if he would become a part of Dean's thigh altogether if he could. Dean put his hand onto Wyatt's shoulders as they both turned around. Already, the smile that managed to charm everyone on the planet who was not Piper Halliwell or a part of her merry band was back on his face.

"Evening, officer," he said, squeezing once at Wyatt's shoulder as a warning for him to keep his silence. Not that that was likely to be a problem, not with the way that Wyatt was actually trying to squirm behind Dean so that he could peek around him. So the kid was big on the cross-country teleportation, but not so much on the follow-through.

"What are you doing here?" the officer repeated, coming a few steps closer to the two of them. Okay, so the grin worked on everyone except for Piper Halliwell, her friends, and jerkwater cops from the ass end of nowhere. Dean firmly believed in making every day a learning experience. He watched as the cop's hand crept closer to his gun even as the rest of him remained soft, inattentive. Dean, Dad, hell, even Sam could have put his guy on the ground before he even realized that the rattling in his mouth was his own teeth coming loose. But that gun…

"Weapons, weapons, everywhere, and not a one for me," Dean muttered before he made sure that his grin was bright and blinding again. He grabbed Wyatt by the back of his shirt and dragged him back in front of him. With the way that the kid hissed and squirmed, Dean would be lucky if he was not arrested for kidnapping as well as that nasty murder charge that kept following him around. "This little guy lost his dog," Dean said, gesturing down to Wyatt. Wyatt broke off his wiggling long enough to look up at Dean with big saucer eyes. If this was the best that the kid had, they would never make a good liar out of him. "It was a pureblood, too, and there were, um, signs of theft. Isn't there some kind of report that I can fill out about that?"

"It's nearly eleven at night, and the front desk is that way," the officer said, pointing out of the room and down the hall to where Dean had heard the voice. There was a great deal more confidence in the officer's stride now as he came forward, but his hand never left the butt of the gun. Dean watched every move that he made.

The time difference. He had let himself forget; fuck. It was the exactly the kind of sloppy mistake that someone hunting alone could not afford to make. Dean's smile flickered for a moment, like a light bulb that only had a few hours left to it before it burned out, and he watched the answering flicker in the cop's face. Maybe not as soft as Dean had pegged him for, then.

"Is it really?" Dean scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck and glanced over at the windows as if he was just now noticing that it was full dark outside, when in California it was still in the most velvet part of the twilight. "We went to a movie, and you know how these little monsters are about sugar. I told my son-" Another goggle-eyed stare from Wyatt. _Sam_ was a better liar. "I told him that a soda bigger than he is was a bad plan, but of course he had to have one. Soon as we get here, he has to pee. Must have gotten lost looking for the bathroom." It was a ludicrous lie, but Dean had certainly sold worse, provided that his audience was receptive.

This one was not. "You took your kid to a movie after you found out that the dog was missing?" the cop asked skeptically. His eyes widened as he came close enough to get a good, leisurely look at Dean's face. One more second-

"Nah, that would be stupid," Dean continued in that pleasant, just-a-citizen voice. If his eyes had gone cold and calculating by then, then the shadows hid it well. "We went before we found out that the dog was missing. Little bladders, you know, you remember how predictable they are."

The police officer did not, in fact, remember how they were. He looked as if everything that had taken place before his twenty-fifth birthday was a blur to him, and as if he breathed a sigh of relief on the day that his childhood was gone forever. "Yeah, that makes perfect sense," he said, changing his tone to one that he would use to coax a mental patient off of a ledge and back to where the soothing hypodermic of thorazine was waiting. If he was trying to sound friendly, then Dean had finally found the person who was the worst liar in the room. "So why don't you step away from the kid while I get that report for you."

"That's an excellent plan," Dean said. His friend in the uniform had finally come close enough for Dean to reach him without putting a few unwelcome holes into his own hide. Dean used the hand that he had shifted into the back of Wyatt's shirt to push him away from himself, so hard that the boy almost lost his balance. He still chose carefully to make sure that Wyatt was not going to crack his head open on the corner of someone's desk at the same time that Dean was trying to avoid getting himself shot, but Wyatt squawked in surprise all the same. The cop's eyes moved to follow the sound. All that Dean needed was a single second in which he was not the center of attention. He lunged forward.

The cop spun around at the sound of Dean's feet with a speed that shocked Dean and made him reevaluate everything that he had thought about the man in the span of a single second. John Winchester would not have made that mistake, John Winchester would have allowed for the cop to possess hidden depths. Dean was goddamned sick of standing himself next to a ghost and finding himself wanting each time even as he could not quite make himself stop, like a sore tooth that he could not keep his tongue away from.

Dean caught the cop's wrist a second too late. When he jerked the man's hand away from his holster, the gun came with it. Dean grit his teeth together at the same time that he shoved his thumb into the sensitive nerves and tendons on the underside of the cop's wrist. The pressure would be excruciating, more than enough to make any normal person drop the weapon.

The cop did, but not without first pulling the trigger back and sending a deafening boom echoing throughout the squad room. For so long as he lived, Dean would never stop swearing that he felt the bullet pass so closely by his head that he could have turned his head and kissed it. In the echo of the report, Dean heard Wyatt scream. His heart stopped in his chest.

It was not until he realized that Wyatt had screamed from fear and not from pain that it began to beat again, though that still was not coaxing it back down from his trachea. Dean was thrown up onto a wave of adrenaline and relief that twisted violently on him, wrested the gun from the cop's nerveless fingers, and shoved it back on him before the rest of his body knew what he was doing. "You aim at little kids?" Dean yelled into the officer's face. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

The officer stared at him, breathing in harsh pants. Dean leaned back as he realized that Wyatt was also staring at him with wide eyes and that the cop had not been aiming at Wyatt at all, that the shot had gone wild. Like a rotten tooth; he couldn't stop himself.

"Where's the evidence room?" Dean demanded instead. He could not say how far away those voices had been, but gunshots had a way of bringing people running. No answer. "Hell with it, this place isn't that big." Dean put the butt of the service pistol into the cop's temple, and the man dropped like a stone. Wyatt was still staring and breathing hard, as if he was watching a terrible movie that he did not know how to turn off. "That right there was about fifty different kinds of illegal," Dean said awkwardly, feeling as if he should be imparting some kind of wisdom onto Wyatt, since he sure was not having any trouble teaching him about violence. "So don't grow up to be me, okay?"

"Okay," Wyatt breathed.

"Good boy," Dean said. "Are you hurt?" He waited for Wyatt to shake his head before he switched the gun to his other hand so that he could examine his palm, which was burning from where he had grabbed the gun by its barrel. Dean began to mutter a litany of obscenities beneath his breath that would have earned him a glare from Piper, at the very least, if she had been present. It was not as if Wyatt was close enough to hear what he was saying, anyway, Dean thought as he could almost _feel_ Piper's eyes on him. He was not sure that Wyatt was of a mind to even understand what Dean was saying if he had been standing right next to him. They boy had his arms wrapped around himself and was staring down at the crumpled cop with a mixture of horror and fascination.

"Don't worry about him, little man," Dean said, clapping Wyatt lightly on the shoulder as he passed him. Just as if Dean had clipped a leash onto his shirt, Wyatt turned and followed him. "He's not hurt. He's just going to sleep for a little bit while I get what you brought me here for."

In spite of the marked resemblance to Leo that Dean had noticed the first time that he had seen Wyatt, the prim, no-nonsense look that Wyatt gave him was his mother in miniature. "You're not supposed to hit police officers," he informed Dean.

Dean tallied up the number of assaulting an officer charges that he should have been charged with since he had come of age a decade previously and snorted out a laugh. "No, you're not, but I think that I can be forgiven this time." He checked the safety on the officer's gun and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans and put his hand back onto Wyatt's shoulder. "Come on, we gotta hustle." Gunshots had a way of making people agitated, even in the ass-end of nowhere.

Wyatt did not shrug Dean's hand away from his shoulder as Dean guided him quickly through the darkened station, shrinking so close instead that Dean more than once thought that they were going to step on one another. He found the evidence room-in a precinct this size, more like an evidence closet-and took off both the lock and the knob with two sharp whacks with the butt of the gun. Dean winced once to hear the ringing sound, as shouts and feet were coming up the hallway. He pushed Wyatt into the room ahead of him and shut the door quickly. They had a little time, but not a whole hell of a lot.

"Stick close to me, little man," Dean whispered to Wyatt as he fumbled around for a light switch or chain. Wyatt reached up and hooked his fingers through the belt loops on Dean's jeans. For most kids, the scariest things in the shadows were the shadows themselves. Wyatt had seen enough to know better.

"There we go." Dean found the chain at least and pulled on it, illuminating a single bulb that swung back and forth and almost created more shadows that it dispelled. He felt Wyatt's hand in his belt loops tighten even further. Dean leaned forward and blew dust from a line of boxes that did not look as if they had been touched since the station had been built, hoping that the officers who ran this place were still as rattled and frightened as they had been when Dean had still been in the hospital, hoping that no one else had been called in who would get the bright idea to take the Colt with them, hoping that human pride could still be counted on to do its job.

When none of the boxes appeared to have labels, Dean pulled one of them down from the shelf so that he could rifle through it, all the while muttering dark things about precincts that were either too lazy or too poor to buy a freaking magic marker. "I don't suppose that you have any other psychic abilities in that toy box of yours," Dean asked Wyatt hopefully. Wyatt opened his mouth, looked panicked for a moment, and then finally shook his head. Dean sighed. "Didn't figure." Wyatt must have heard Henry talking on the phone, then, to know where the precinct was. Dean lifted the lid off of the box and pulled out clothing that did not look as if it had been worn since Woodstock and still smelled faintly of marijuana. Wyatt crinkled his nose.

"You know," Dean said when the silence stretched and became oppressive, speaking softly to avoid attracting the attention of the increasingly alarmed voices outside of the door, "I had a brother like you, not quite normal." His breath hardly hitched as he referred to Sam in the past tense. Dean guessed that he ought to be proud of himself for that. "Not exactly like you," he went on as he realized that Wyatt was hanging onto his every word. "He didn't come with his own transport, for one. But he could still do a lot of other things that would flip most people's brains inside out. Probably literally, if he got mad and brooded about it for awhile." Dean stopped sifting through everyone else's bad behavior as the clouds of dust that he was sending up began to feeling as if they were creating sand dunes in the back of his throat. He coughed into the sleeve of his jacket. "You sure you don't have any Shining that you're holding out on me? Think really hard: if you were a demon-killing gun shoved into a closet by cops who had been trained in Hazzard County, where would you be?"

Wyatt shook his head and smiled shyly, so Dean sighed. "Damn." He leveled his finger at Wyatt. "You don't go telling your mother that I've been cussing in front of you, either."

Again, that shy smile. From what Dean had seen of Wyatt so far, he didn't do it often. "I won't."

"Good kid." Dean pulled down another box and blew the dust from the top before he cracked it open and began going through the contents. He was beginning to think that the better part of human nature had triumphed and the gun was now sitting with the FBI rather than being squirreled away by people who had no idea what they possessed.

Yeah, so much for that plan. Dean's hand closed around something smooth and cool, and he nearly whooped with joy. He pulled the gun from the box, pushing to the side fragments of what looked as if it had been a stop sign before being peppered with buckshot. The Colt snugged against Dean's palm in a way that felt many times over more natural than the fit of the cop's lifted gun, as if it had been made for him to hold it. Dean had never been one to believe in destiny. Even so, he had to admit that his heart was beating faster as he raised the gun so that he could examine it beneath the light of the single swinging bulb. They had even done him the favor of keeping it loaded for him. One bullet left.

"Guess I had better not waste it, then," Dean muttered. He only shook his head when he saw that Wyatt was looking confused. "Don't worry about it, little man. Just thinking out loud here." A sound directly outside of the room made Dean swivel his head quickly in that direction. He held out his hand so that Wyatt could take it. "I really hope that that power of yours is a roundtrip thing, 'cause otherwise we're screwed."

Wyatt put his hand obediently back into Dean's and squeezed hard, while a blue haze began once again to rise up and fill Dean's vision. He returned Wyatt's knuckle-cracking grip and felt the old sensation of something settling into his navel and jerking him forward, though the smile never left his face. He had the gun, his gun, the ass-kicking, name-taking gun that was going to end all of this once and for all. There was very little that could happen at this point, he figured, to take that victory away.

End Part Six


	7. Chapter 7

Part Seven

As Wyatt tumbled them both out of the cool, climate-controlled air of the precinct and into the blasts of hell, Dean could not help but think that there was someone out there in the universe who listened to him. He began coughing immediately on the thick, acrid smoke that was rolling through the air like a living thing, its fingers reaching out to first fondle and then strangle everything within its path. Dean raised the hand that held the gun so that he could cough against it, only to hiss and jerk away almost as quickly as his lips felt as if a burning brand had been placed against them. Dean's fingers began to burn a few seconds later, but he only gritted his teeth. Damned if he would drop the thing and lose it among the smoke now, not after he had fought so hard in all of the months since losing it.

"Mommy!" Wyatt screamed, and began to sprint away from Dean into the smoke. Dean grabbed quickly for him and barely managed to hook his fingers into Wyatt's collar, so that he almost strangled the boy as he jerked him backwards and against Dean again. "No, no, no, let me go, it has her, MOMMY!" Wyatt was wheezing desperately against his own tears by the time that he screamed the final word in a clear, full-throated wail. He twisted around and began to beat at Dean's leg with his fists when he realized that Dean was not going to let him go.

"Not so that you can go get yourself killed, too," Dean muttered, breaking off so that he could cough again. Dimly, through the smoke and its leaping orange handmaidens climbing the walls beyond that, he saw the same armchair that Henry had grabbed his shirt off of earlier. A second later, it was engulfed. 'I left them here,' Dean thought, unable to stop himself, that same old rotten tooth. 'I left them here, and it came.' He might has well have hopped in his car and made a road trip out of it, and left them to whatever mercies that the demon decided to mete out.

Dean twisted his hand even tighter through the back of Wyatt's shirt, making the boy yelp and momentarily pause in the beating that he was delivering to the side of Dean's leg. "Piper!" Dean yelled as loudly as he could. His voice cracked as he took in a deep breath of smoke that felt as if it was driving barbed wire into the soft inner flesh of his throat. Dean coughed hard and tasted soot before he yelled again. "Piper!" When there was no response save for the crackling of the flames and the increasingly insistent waves of heat beating against the side of his face, he tried again, his tone growing desperate. "Chris!" The demon had to be after Chris, then, and it wanted to leave him alive. There was a chance, however small, that he could get one person out of here.

The rest, he would just have to avenge. It was becoming a long list. Dean bit down on the inside of his mouth and tasted blood as he thought about it, and realized the satisfaction with which he would carry out the task.

There was a cracking noise, the only warning that Dean received before all of the windows in the living room blew outward. The shards of glass hung in the air for a moment, collecting the light from the flames and throwing it back like diamonds before they fell down to the lawn outside. Even though the glass was exploding away from them, Dean grabbed Wyatt up, held him against his chest, and whirled them both around so that he was shielding Wyatt with his own body. He did not do it a moment too soon. Encouraged by the fresh supply of oxygen, the flames jumped that much higher, until Dean swore that he felt fire licking at his shoulders and singing the hair from the back of his neck. He steeled himself and gripped ever tighter the gun that felt as if it was burning an imprint into his palm. Dean held Wyatt beneath his arm like a star quarterback running for the touchdown before he spun back towards the window and started to thrust Wyatt out of it. "Go the neighbors and call for help," Dean told Wyatt urgently, even though the boy was still shedding such hysterical tears that he was not sure that he was able to hear anything that Dean was saying at all, and the fire was spiraling so far out of control that most of the neighbors had likely already called. "Go the neighbor across the street, get as far away from this house as you can."

"No!" Still sobbing hysterically, Wyatt did not intend to be dropped out of the window and onto the relative safety of the lawn without a fight. He flailed his arm out and grabbed for the windowsill to keep himself from being shoved out of the house, cutting a deep wound into his palm as he closed his hand around a jagged piece of glass that was still caught in the frame. Rather than howling as most four year-olds would have done, Wyatt did not seem to realize that he had been hurt at all. "I want my mommy! I want to find Chris!" He braced one of his feet against the windowsill and began to kick at Dean's hands with the other.

"_Goddamnit_," Dean grunted through gritted teeth as he struggled to simultaneously maintain his grip on the gun and keep from dropping Wyatt onto his head. If Wyatt would cooperate with him, Dean might even be able to go back and identify the bodies of his mother and surrogate uncle for him. Yeah, Dean was offering Wyatt a hell of a deal, there.

"Dean!" Piper's voice was so cracked with smoke and strain that it was more akin to a banshee's shriek than it was an actual human shout. It was so welcome, and at the same time so startling, that Dean nearly dropped Wyatt in spite of all of his best efforts to keep a grip on him, damned good eel impression that the kid was carrying on or not. Dean jerked Wyatt back against his chest, where the boy shoved his face against Dean's neck and continued to make sad snuffling noises, so deeply embroiled in his own hysterics that he did not realize that it was his mother's voice that had echoed out across the living room. Dean turned.

Piper was still wearing her hair back in a ponytail, technically. Most of it had by now escaped into a dark cloud around her face, turning her into the image of every witch in every storybook that had been Dean's primers as he was growing up. There was a streak of soot across her nose, and a sullen trickle of blood from her lower lip, as if she was wearing garish lipstick that had melted in the heat. Alive and walking around when he had been so sure that she was dead only a few seconds before, Dean thought that she might be the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. Just for a moment, revenge faded to become a dim echo against all of his priorities, and Dean tightened his arms even further around Wyatt.

Piper was holding both of her hands out in front of her, clenched into fists as if she meant to wrestle the demon down to the ground if that was what was required of her. Henry was directly behind her and was holding Chris in his arms, while Chris screamed every bit as loudly as Wyatt had been wailing only a few minutes before. There was an ugly burn crawling over Henry's shoulder, actually melting scraps of his shirt into the blistered skin, running up to a point directly behind his ear. Henry held his head at an awkward angle, lips pulled back from his teeth, but his arms wrapped around Chris were every bit as secure as the ones that Dean had around Wyatt.

"Piper," Dean breathed her name and felt his knees unlock for a moment before they took him again. He shook his head once and looked around at the flames. "How-"

An enormous chunk of ceiling came down with a great rending noise of cracking plaster and breaking wood, a swirling of sparks that Dean had to shield his eyes from quickly or else be blinded. Piper threw her hands out quickly in a warding-off gesture, the air seemed to shimmer and grow pregnant for a moment, as if lighting might be born, and the ceiling materials froze in a fiery clump only a few feet from the living room floor. Dean could not keep himself from gaping for a second as sparks hung suspended in the air like fireflies. At least he knew now what kind of whammy Piper had laid on him back at the manor site. He shook his head to throw off the shock and yelled across the room at Piper, "Get-get Chris out of here, he's the one that it wants! I'll stay and deal with the thing." The smoke was making Dean's head spin, making past swirl into the present too quickly for him to keep a firm grip on which was which, and it was almost not Chris's name that he said.

Piper coughed and had to spite a fat gob of what looked like sooty phlegm to the side so that she could even speak. As she turned her head, Dean saw that the heat had already drawn an intricate web of fine blisters across her cheekbone down to the side of her mouth. "No, you don't understand," she said, and had to break off so that she could fall into a coughing fit. She froze one of the walls as she did so, flames and all, so that the fire looked eerily like an ice sculpture. "_The fire began outside_."

Dean's breath only had time to hitch in his throat for a second before an inhumanly strong pair of arms snaked through the window, grabbed him by his jaw and neck, and wrenched him back against the windowsill. The salt had all been burned or blown away when the window exploded outwards, and Dean's back slamming up against the sill soon scattered all the rest. He dropped Wyatt back down to the floor so hard that the boy almost went sprawling and gave him a shove in the direction of his mother. "Go!" Dean bellowed.

Wyatt, unbelievably, hesitated for a second so that he could look back at Dean, his small face settling itself into lines of determination as if he meant to actually intervene on Dean's behalf. At Dean's glare, he skittered around the frozen flames and ran to his mother's side.

Dean gagged as his head was jerked back at a nearly impossible angle by the hands that struggled to pull him over the edge of the sill, as they dug into the soft flesh beneath his jaw and threatened to take away his air altogether. Small and feminine the hands were, but they still carried with them a strength that went far beyond mere skin and bone. Dean tilted his head back even further in spite of the way that his neck protested, in spite of the way that he could hear his father's voice yelling in his head that he was only baring more of his throat as he did so. He stared into a pair of hazel eyes whose spark had long since been snuffed, into a face surrounded by long blonde hair that had seen a bad bleach job more than once. Essence of Valley Girl, in other words, so distilled that he could probably make a small fortune off of bottling and selling it. Dean would feel much better about his assessment of this girl if he couldn't feel fresh bruises being imprinted into his trachea with every moment. Dean wheezed and brought the butt of the Colt down onto the bimbo's knuckles as hard as he could. Even with black spots multiplying like flies in front of his eyes, even with his own exhalations whistling in his ears and no inhalations coming in to replace them, with his thoughts becoming dizzier by the moment and with a level of rage that Dean had never experienced before, even immediately after he had woken up in the hospital, taking over him from nowhere, that was still saying a hell of a lot. He heard the bones shatter and for a second swore that he saw splinters of white go flying by the corner of his eye. The hand around his neck loosened enough for him to pull in a deep, shuddering breath before it slammed shut again.

"You killed my family," the Demon Formerly Known as Barbie snarled down into his face. It had curled its lips back from its teeth like a dog, so that spittle flecked its chin. It couldn't keep its hand closed any longer, not with the way that Dean had shattered its knuckles, but instead squeezed and released at Dean's neck as if it thought that it was milking a cow.

"Fair enough, bitch," Dean growled back at it in a voice that was much deeper than his normal register and sounded as if he had been eating charcoal. If he could have spit a mouthful of brimstone up into the demon's face, he would have. "So now it's just one on one. You're the one who made it that way, as I recall." The gun might make a damned fine bludgeon, but it had been designed with a far more noble purpose in mind. Dean swung the Colt around and forced it beneath the bimbo's chin, shoved her head back at an angle that he hoped was even half again as painful as what he was doing to him. He jerked his finger back against the trigger.

This thing, this woman-shaped wrongness that Dean guessed had once been named Billie, changed its bared teeth into an actual smile, one that would have sent a shiver down Dean's spine if his vision was not tinted in red, the blood from the inside of the Impala and the blood that he had not yet gotten the chance to shed. But he would. Fuck, yeah, he would. Without Piper's intervention, it still seemed as if time froze, the second stretching on and on forever without snapping. Billie creaked her neck backwards even farther until her head was tilted at an angle that would have broken her neck if she had still been human, and shoved Dean backwards with a strength and speed that sure as _hell_ could not claim to have ever been a part of the human race. There was a snapping sound not unlike a sonic boom as time resumed itself.

Dean skidded across the carpet and barked his spine against the leg of Henry's coffee table hard enough to make one side of his body go tingling and then numb, ducking his head so that he would not put out his eye on a frozen lick of flame. The bullet that should have taken Billie through the chin and left most of her brains splattered against the plaster above her head whistled harmlessly out the window. Though he knew that it was moving far too fast, Dean still swore that he could see it go. "No!" The last bullet, the last chance, gone into the sky and the leaves of Henry's fucking oak tree.

Billie paused so that she could inspect the last few grains of salt left on the windowsill, rubbing her fingers against one another as she braced herself on the sill and began to climb inside. Dean had not been imagining things when he saw pieces of bone go flying by his face. Her knuckles were mangled and bloody, flecks of white sticking among the red like maggots. "Yes," she continued as if Dean had not just tried and failed to kill her, "but you're the one who had to go and make it all personal. Tit for tat, as they say." Billie paused, crouching, in the window like a gargoyle and grinned across the room. "Hello, Piper."

Wyatt had rushed over to Piper as soon as he had realized that she was, against all odds, alive. He clung to her leg now like the world's largest belt ornament, all but sitting on her foot. In spite of this, there was not the slightest spectacle of the ridiculous about her as she stood staring Billie down, more akin to Athena than to any of the cackling witches riding across the sky on their brooms that Dean had learned about before his mother's death. "Over my dead body are you going to take Chris, Billie," she said, spitting out the girl's original name as if it was a death warrant. With the way that her eyes were glittering, it did not seem to be an empty threat. "Or did you forget how well trying to take my boys' power worked for you the last time?"

Billie's laugh had an unnatural, phlegmy sound about it. If she was thinking that she had only lost one to Piper's two, or if the cancer inside of her was thinking it, then they both had the good sense not to voice this thought aloud. "Keep him," she snapped. Billie made an imperious gesture with her hand, almost as a queen would shoo off an annoying supplicant. Even while the demon was wearing the face of a sweet and slightly dim co-ed, the menace carried across the room like a thundercloud.

Dean swore that the air _rippled_, and then Piper was flying was flying to the other side of the room to strike against the far wall with a thunking noise that sounded like bruised ribs. Wrapped up in the hyper-awareness that only came with being completely swamped by adrenaline, Dean saw flakes of plaster fall down and into her hair. Henry shouted, but it with his badly burned arm it was all that he could do not to drop Chris, let alone intervene. Dean grunted and pushed himself up to his feet to take the task on himself, only for Billie to make another one of those gestures with her hand. He careened through the air in the same way that Piper had only seconds before, striking his own wall with enough force to send déjà vu crashing over him in a wave. Piper shouted something that sounded as if it might be his name and flicked out her hands to turn the flames into another eerie frozen tableau. Dean could still feel the heat coming through his jacket, even though the flames against his shoulders were hard and still like being shoved against glass. He winced and struggled to get back down, not loosening his grip upon the gun even though the damned thing was useless now. The demon hidden within the girl made a scoffing noise before it turned its attention back onto Piper.

When Piper had flown backwards, so had Wyatt with her, still clinging stubbornly to her leg like one of those plastic monkeys that some people liked to put on the tops of their pencils. Piper's best efforts to shield his head with her arms still could not fully protect him, and he had fallen from her leg and down to the carpet with a dazed thump. Piper yelled her son's name in a voice gone ragged with panic, but the demon was keeping her pinned like a butterfly to a board. Veins stood out in her neck as she strained against the force and tried to bring up her hands so that she could unleash another one of her powerful and nearly indescribable blasts.

Henry set Chris down on the floor, where he put his hands over his eyes and continued to scream in terror, and rushed to Piper's aid. He scarcely touched her before he was flung into the wall himself, directly onto the burned shoulder. Henry made a terrible guttural noise that was only bested by the _wet_ sound that the flesh made as it tore and slid, limp, back down to the floor.

"No," Dean muttered over and over again, unable to make himself stop, as he forced himself away from the wall. "No." It didn't get to end like this. That son of a bitch didn't get his happy ending after he had taken it away from everyone else. And more importantly, Dean told himself, feeling as if a dirty film had been ripped away from his vision after being there for so long that he had stopped noticing its presence altogether, everyone else got to be the ones to walk away at the end of the picture.

The demon cut him a sharp glance as it pulled Piper away from the wall and then slammed her back again, hard enough to knock her head against the plaster and leave a dent. The fire crawling up the walls that she had frozen came brilliantly alive again. "We'll settle our account in just a minute," the demon told Dean as it hurled him backwards one more time. He felt the hair on the back of his neck singe and begin to fill the air with a foul smell. The skin blistered as he set his boot against the wall and pushed himself away before he could be immolated. He was not worth the demon's interest beyond that.

With a gesture, Wyatt was dragged, shrieking, into the center of the living room floor. Finally, Dean understood. 'The fire started outside,' Piper had told him. So that the demon could destroy the careful protections that he had set out and then come inside, but not so that it could take Chris.

Piper stared at her oldest son, gasping, with all of the panic and determination that Dean had seen in her only seconds before stricken away. She looked as if it had been slapped right out of her. When the blankness began to roll away, what peeked out in its place was something very close to despair. She mouthed her son's name once before the demon began to haul her up the wall. Piper kicked her legs hard, her heeled boots beating out a tattoo that destroyed the plaster ever more, as a second grim smile began to spread across the front of her blouse.

"Like hell," Dean growled beneath his breath, the last articulate thing that he said before it was swollen up by a roar of pure rage. He launched himself from the floor and into the demon, carrying them both over backwards through his bodyweight. It was not in his father any longer. Fine, maybe it should not be so much easier for him to strike the thing when it was embedded in a wisp of a girl hardly half his father's size than it had been when it was in John Winchester himself, but Dean was not thinking of such things then. He flipped the Colt around in his hand one more time so that he was gripping it by the barrel and then brought it down against the demon's face, hard. The cracking of bone was the most satisfying sound that Dean had heard all day, only to be dethroned a second later by the following, louder crack as he did it again. Dean began to pant as he kept swinging the gun, that old film coming down over his vision again, not even caring any longer if he killed the demon or the demon killed him. He barely even heard the thump as Piper slid down the wall and back to the floor behind him. He was wheezing from smoke inhalation and from exertion, and the demon's eyes were flashing from yellow to hazel and back again, wildly, unable to stay any one color for more than a few seconds at a time. It was all that Dean could do not to put them out.

"Dean." Piper's voice when she called his name was low and plaintive, little more than a croak. It was as effective as if Piper had kneeled down in front of him and slapped him. He reeled back from the demon and stared into the face that he had ruined, of which the only part left was those glowing eyes. Dean twisted his head around and saw Piper through the smoke, though his eyes were stinging and her outline swayed and blurred. She was crouched over, one arm pressed tightly across her stomach. The blood leaking around her fingers glittered in the firelight.

Dean let the Colt fall from his fingers as he leaned back and stared at the damage that he had done. The gun was sticky with the demon's blood and took a bit of flesh with it from the burn that had already been seared into Dean's palm; he hardly felt it. "We're not done," he growled, noticing for the first time that the flames were active again and that the thick smoke was making it difficult to breathe. The demon did not speak-Dean was pretty sure that he had broken Billie's jaw-but it's eyes burned promises all the same. The air around them both began to feel thick and charged with energy. He had a way of getting thrown into walls every time that happened.

Dean rolled away and watched instead as the cluster of fire and plaster that had been hanging over the room like an awkward chandelier crashed down over the demon. He still felt his hands clenching and unclenching themselves into fists as he rushed over to Piper, still wanting to go back and put them around the demon's neck, and never mind that he knew that it wouldn't do a damned bit of good. He took the deepest breaths that he was able and wondered at how easy it had been a year before to convince himself that revenge was optional.

The look that Piper was giving him as he knelt beside her, one very close to horror, acted as a slap that he desperately needed. Dean wondered how much of the beating that she had seen and how much more horrified her expression would be if she knew that, even though his hands ached, there was a part of him that still wanted to dive beneath the flames and drag the demon back out again. If she was feeling the same thing, if they really were two peas in a spooky pod. "Lean on me," Dean told Piper in the most gentle voice that he was capable of at the moment. Smoke inhalation still made it into a low and threatening rasp.

Piper shook her head and pushed him away. "I can stand," she told him, even though the quaver in her voice and the amount of blood that he could see soaking her blouse and the front of her jeans did little to inspire confidence. "Go help Henry, hurry." She did not wait to see if he was going to obey her before she called out in a voice that croaked almost as much as Dean's own, "Wyatt."

Wyatt picked himself up from the place where the demon had unceremoniously dragged him and looked around, as if he thought hat he would be pulled back again the moment that he tried to move. When that did not happen, he rushed over to his screaming younger brother and threw his arms around him. There was no verbal communication between the boys that Dean could detect, but Chris, still wailing, followed Wyatt back to their mother's side after Wyatt put his arm around him. Piper put her hand against Wyatt's shoulder and used it to slowly push herself back up to her feet. Wyatt had stopped crying, though his tear tracks were still gleaming and fresh, and stood with more patience than any four year-old ought to be capable of as his mother used him for a few seconds of support.

Dean went to Henry, who was just beginning to stir back into consciousness, and tried to roll him over. Henry let out a short cry of pain before his eyelids fluttered and he stared at Dean uncomprehendingly. "Come on, man," Dean said, trying to slide his shoulder beneath Henry's to help him back to his feet. "We gotta shag ass." The fire was raging higher than ever, heat making the room around them ripple when it was visible through the smoke at all. If Piper had enough power left in those batteries of hers to throw out another freeze, then she was too distracted to do it.

Henry nodded and then sagged heavily against Dean as if even that movement exhausted him. "I'll lead." Dean was not sure that that was an idea for the history books, given the way that Henry still could not stand on his own, until Henry added, "I don't need to see to know where I'm going in this house."

Dean shrugged in acceptance before he turned to look at Piper and her boys, the start of it all. Piper was holding onto Wyatt's hand while he in turn held Chris's, so that the three of them were standing in a row like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Dean thought that she would rather be holding the both of them so tightly that they would hardly be able to breathe, let alone wiggle away, if she had not been so busy using her other arm to hold her blood inside of her. Dean glanced at the pile of plaster that was engulfed in flames and sending out new sparks that raced across the carpet like spiders before he nodded once to Piper and turned in the vague direction of the door. 'The people are more important.' Other people recited the Lord's Prayer. Dean would take what he could get.

They staggered out into the front yard as a unit at the same time that something within Henry's house gave way with a great crashing noise. Dean hoped that it fell down directly on the demon's fat, over-bleached head and made its ears ring for hours, even if it could not kill it. He gritted his teeth and instead turned halfway so that he was shielding Henry as a warm pocket of air followed the sound of the collapse and acted like an enormous hand shoving them all forward, carrying with it both sparks and shrapnel. He dropped Henry abruptly on the lawn as his knees gave out beneath him, collapsing down to the grass by Henry's side. Henry propped himself up on his good arm and bit hard into his lower lip, as if he was struggling not to scream. He looked up at the remains of his house and swore.

Dean put his hand on Henry's uninjured shoulder and squeezed. "Insurance, buddy."

The fresh air was so pure and so sweet that for several long seconds Dean's lungs did not know quite what to do with it. He coughed hard and spat out sooty phlegm before he made his way over to Piper. He did not hesitate before he put his hands onto her shoulders and turned her to face him. "Piper," he said, touching her hair, unsure if she even knew that he was there through the shock and the blood loss. Unsure if _he_ even knew that she was there, as everything since leaving the house had a hazy, quality to it. If he could manage to lose the damned Colt, if he could manage to lose their last shot- It didn't bear thinking about, but Dean could not stop his mind from returning to it again and again.

Piper shook her head once in some kind of mute rejection before she leaned forward, for one second pressing the side of her face against his own. There were still faint traces of her shampoo in her hair, beneath the reek of the smoke. She was trembling, and her face was very pale as the sound of fire engines could finally be heard several blocks over. "Come one, we gotta leave before it digs out." Dean was not sure what he planned on doing after that. Find a way, through sheer force of fucking will if he had to, but that thing was going down. For his brother, and for his father, for the family in front of him and because once upon a time he had thought that revenge was not such an important thing, after all, and he liked that man a hell of a lot more than he did the one that he was playing at being now.

"This isn't the right place," Piper muttered before she stirred as if she was waking up from a deep sleep. The trembling ceased as abruptly as if a light switch had been turned off, and she pulled away from Dean's chest.

"Leave," she told him. "Now."

He leaned away from her, aghast. "_What_?"

Piper reached out and touched his face. Compared to the inside of the house, her skin was so cool as to be startling. "I trust you, Dean," she said, "but the police don't, and this will be the second fire today where a mysterious stranger has come to my rescue."

She was right, damnit, as much as Dean hated to admit it. He took a deep breath and glanced once more back at Henry's house, willing the demon to come back outside so that he could make a another try at bashing its head in. It would not, though, just as Dean had already known that he could not use Piper's and the boys' safety as an excuse to stay. The demon wanted to do its work in darkness. The fire was lighting up the lawn as brightly as if it were noon.

Dean matched gazes with Henry, who was wincing and struggling to pull at the edges of his shirt, fused into the wound. Watching it alone was enough to make Dean wince. Henry nodded very slightly in agreement with Piper and then jerked his head in the direction of Dean's car.

Much as Dean wanted to dig his fingers down into the grass and cling to the earth itself if that was what it took to keep himself from being driven from this place, even he had to admit that he was not going to be able to do much hunting if he was locked into a jail cell. He pushed himself to his feet, got into his car, and waited until the flashing lights stopped at the curb and the paramedics rushed towards Piper and her children before he drove away.

End Part Seven


	8. Chapter 8

Part Eight

Even as the smell of the oil that Dean dabbed against the windows was strange and alien to her, reminding her that it had been far too long since she had done any real cooking, Piper had to admit now that it was soothing. She sat at Henry's kitchen table and chewed at the end of the pen that she had found in one of his kitchen drawers, staring down at the page that stared back at her every bit as blankly. She had already covered one full page with the beginnings of spells that had then been scribbled out when they hadn't satisfied her, and with every failure the ache behind her eyes grew that much stronger. Piper bit at her lower lip and wondered how Dean would react if she asked him to throw more of the oil around as a crude kind of aromatherapy. She had certainly tried everything else over the course of the past year.

Piper snuck a quick glance over her shoulder and saw that Wyatt had abandoned the DVD that he and Chris had been watching and was grabbing the hem of Dean's jacket in his fist. Unbelievably, she felt a faint smile touch her face as she watched the two of them. Wyatt was seeming more like a child again than he had in months, and it had to happen around the person who most treated him like an adult.

Realizing that she was dawdling, Piper sighed and turned back to the page in front of her, laying her pen down and rubbing at her eyes for a moment. It was not as if she had not written spells before, or even as if she had never written spells while her own life, her children's lives, and the fate of the very world depended upon what she was able to come up with. She had had her sisters by her side then, though, and they had been the three most powerful witches in the world. She had had Leo. Now her sister's ghost was showing herself to a complete stranger but not Piper herself, Leo was gone, and there was something out there that did not just want to take one of her boys but wanted to…pervert him. Wanted to take him and change him and make him into something that Piper strongly doubted was going to be a Boy Scout. Piper's hand curled around the plastic pen hard enough to pull a creak of protest from it before she was able to force herself to relax again. She had always been better at fixing than she had been at brooding.

"So then do something," Piper whispered in a voice so low that it was scarcely audible even to herself. She set the pen down and flexed the ache out of her fingers before she picked it up again.

"By darkest night and this witch's might," she muttered to herself as her hand flew across the page, "I cast you away from my sight. Back to hell you shall be borne to trouble the living no more, and never again set foot on earth's sea or shore." She whispered the spell out loud as she wrote it for a reason, in spite of the fact that doing so was the kind of amateur mistake that had led to replacing the chandelier or sending the grandfather clock at the manor out for yet another repair more than once. There was something that Piper needed to know.

The air around her grew thick for a moment, thick and heavy, like the air outside could feel just before a storm unleashed the lightning and the rain. Piper held her breath and hoped, only to exhale again when all of that energy disappeared the very next second without even a burst of pyrotechnics. "Damn it," Piper whispered to herself. None of the kids were near enough to hear her, and it was either swear or cry. She set the pen quickly back down on the table before she wound up clenching it so hard that she would have sent ink shooting out again across her fingers and rubbed at her eyes instead.

"I liked it better when all that I had to do was throw potions at them and wave my hands around." It was not the spell that had failed, it was that she was one witch by herself, and while she might have done great things in the past, the woman that she was now did not seem to be the woman that she had been then. Unless Piper decided to dabble in necromancy, however, she was pretty much the only help that she was going to find for herself. Maybe she could go by the usual suspects when the sun had risen again and collect ingredients for one of the vanquishing spells that she still knew by heart, Book or not. Henry would not mind if they imposed on him just a little bit longer by using his kitchen, or if he did he would not say so. At the moment, they were close enough to something terrible happening that Piper did not particularly care. Even if she had been keeping a full stock of potions ingredients ever since her sisters and Leo had died, she wouldn't have a working kitchen to prepare them in. Had Piper still been holding the pen, she was sure that she would have broken it.

"Hey, Dean," Piper began, turning around in her chair. From the corner of her eye she saw a flash of blue, gone by the time that she was able to fully focus upon it. So were her son and the man who had pledged to keep him safe. Piper lunged up fro the chair fast enough to send it crashing back down to the kitchen floor behind her. "Dean? Wyatt?" It was far too easy for a note of panic to go crashing through her voice these days.

Taking several deep breaths and refusing to let that panic have the free rein that it desperately wanted, Piper righted her chair before she walked over to the place where Chris was still wrapped up in Spongebob. He looked up as Piper knelt down in front of him. Her youngest had been wandering in and out of hysterics all day; this was the calmest that Piper had seen him in hours. "Sweetie," Piper began in a voice kept calm so that she would not spook him, "do you know where your brother went?" What kind of detailed and useful answer she expected to get from a two year-old, she could not say. Chris only looked towards the place where Wyatt had been standing last and then shook his head mutely. Piper resisted the urge to knock over one of Henry's lamps and instead swooped Chris up and into her arms, straightening and calling for Henry. It had been blue that she had seen from the far reaches of her vision, Piper reminded herself, _blue_, not the crackle of a demon's flame. Wherever Dean and Wyatt had gone, Wyatt had been orbing and in full control of the destination. He could not have felt too threatened.

And children never climbed into waiting vans without feeling absolutely certain that that they were safe in doing so, either. Piper yelled for Henry again.

He emerged from the hallway that led to his bedroom, wearing a fresh shirt and looking as if he had just finished shaving. "Yeah?" Henry asked, rubbing his thumb along his jaw to pick up the few traces of shaving cream that he had missed. Whatever plans that he might have had for the day were long gone, and if he had actually slept then Piper had missed it.

"Dean and Wyatt are gone," Piper told him.

Henry snapped from exhaustion to full alertness in under a second. "How?" he demanded. Piper saw him glance towards the front door, where the deadbolt was still firmly engaged.

"I think that Wyatt orbed them both somewhere." Piper only reminded herself to loosen her grip on Chris when he began to squeak.

It was difficult to make brown eyes look cold, but all things considered, Piper thought that Henry did a fine job. "That son of a bitch," he snapped. Piper had no doubt that it was not her four year old son that he was swearing at, as she was calling Dean quite a few names within the recesses of her own mind. "We trusted him."

"No," Piper corrected softly, her entire body feeling as if it had been forced into a freezer against her will. "You didn't trust him. I did."

Some of the anger went out of Henry's eyes, though certainly not all. He began to look pitying beneath all of the panic. "Piper," Henry began, reaching out to take her by the arm and comfort her.

Piper pulled back before she could be touched. "No," she insisted again. "It's true." In her arms, Chris snuggled closer against her neck. "_You_ were suspicious. _You_ wanted him gone. _I_ was the one who insisted that he stay. He has a murder warrant out on him, how much bigger of a red flag did I need?" Piper's voice was rising towards hysteria as she realized how blind that she had been, how stupid-worse, how _willfully_ stupid. She had been so thrilled to know that there was someone else out there who both knew what lurked in the shadows and, unlike Henry and her father, had a hope in hell of doing something about it, that she had been able to overlook everything else. Small wonder that she had been living nearly as a mortal for the past year.

"You cast spells on him to make sure that he was not a demon," Henry said cautiously, seemingly forgetting that mere seconds before he had been at the head of the posse to bring back Dean Winchester's head. Piper had allowed herself exactly one week in which to go to pieces after Leo had died, one week longer than she had given herself after her sisters had done the same, before she ordered herself to pull everything back together and look to her boys. They boys had stayed with their grandfather, and Piper had pulled the phone out of the wall.

"And I'm doing _such_ a great job with magic lately, aren't I?" Piper snapped back bitterly. "Even if he is human, sometimes humans are just awful." She tightened her grip on Chris until he whimpered before she was able to force herself to loosen it again. Piper nodded once, half to herself, before she said in a voice that she hardly recognized as her own, "I don't have anything with me that I can use for a locator spell." Dean or Dean's partner, if that was the way that it turned out to be, had been damned clever in that regard. Even though the fire at the apartment had not killed her as it was supposed to, it had still managed to destroy those few magical supplies that she had had left, regardless of whether or not she had been able to use them or not. "Unless Dean's taken Wyatt to a few different places in the underworld, I'll find him." Piper faced Henry, not batting at eyelash as she said, "You do realize that I'm not going to wait until the shops open up again tomorrow to get everything that I need."

Henry was already shrugging into a jacket. "If I thought that the police could deal with any of this, I would have told them. I'll look the other way. Just…" Henry made a face as if he was well aware of the ridiculousness of what he was about to say. "Get the generic eye of newt instead of the name brand, okay?"

"I'll pay for everything when this is over," Piper told him. "Anonymously." And she would probably wind up paying for quite a few windows in those shops, too, as she did not think that tonight, with all of the emotions that she was barely keeping under control, she was going to have a great deal of control over what Paige had once jokingly referred to as her fists of fury, either. Dean had better hope and pray that Wyatt was able to break away from him and come home on his own. Still stinging from her own negligence and unsure that she would even be able to perform the spell once she had the requisite ingredients together, Piper was not feeling inclined to be lenient.

She threw open the front door as Chris continued to hang from her neck like the world's largest and squirmiest necklace and marched out onto the porch. Henry said, "Piper, what is that?" from behind her, a bare second before Piper felt it herself, a thickening in the air that somehow reminded her of the moment of full-body rictus just before being sick. Magic being gathered rapidly together in one place, and ugly magic at that. For Henry it registered as nothing more than an odd current, the air just before an electrical storm; for Piper, it was all that she could do to remember her insistence that nobody swear in front of her kids. When Billie's vacant eyes and blonde hair popped up in front of her, she had to grind her teeth against one another hard so that she would not peel the paint right off of Henry's house.

Billie-or the thing in Billie-cocked her head to one side like a bird and regarded her with an alert intelligence that Piper had not been expecting. "I prefer blondes for my daughter, if I can find them," it said in an odd, gravelly voice, as if a much larger personality was struggling to make itself heard through a much smaller throat. "But you'll do." Just as the voice belonged to Billie and at the same time did not, the hand that gripped at Piper's wrist and began to drag her forward might have ended in well-groomed, perfectly manicured nails, but it still possessed a strength far beyond that which should have been found in one slender co-ed. Beyond anything that should have belonged to anything _human_.

Piper yelped when she felt her feet start to leave the ground, and she nearly dropped Chris. He squealed once before Piper was able to steady him. Henry yelled her name as Piper straightened so that she could get a good, long look at the woman who had taken her family from her. It did not matter that by rights Billie was only responsible for the deaths of Phoebe and of Paige and not of Leo, for so far as Piper was concerned Billie was the one who had started the spiral. Billie's mouth was twisted into a smile of malice that Piper had never seen before and that looked terribly unnatural there, not even in the seconds before the manner had exploded, and her eyes were gleaming with a faintly golden light. She looked so happy that Piper thought that Billie might even lean forward and give her a kiss.

The thought of this woman having any further contact with her after she had already done so much, or of even continuing to touch her at all, filled Piper with a black rage. Her ears were overtaken with a sound that was like the buzzing of bees, and she could feel blood surging up and into her face. She was no Phoebe, but the foot that she lifted up and put into Billie's stomach with all of her strength felt pretty damned good all the same. Billie grunted and reeled back. Piper was not a fool; she knew that it was only shock. Already the fingers were tightening around her wrist again by the time that Piper scrambled back, aided along the way by Henry twisting his hand through the back of her blouse and bodily yanking her backwards and against him. Billie's strength was tremendous, and something in Piper's wrist popped before she was able to wrench herself free. She staggered into Henry's chest and over the threshold, being careful at the last possible moment so that she would not put her feet down where they would not disturb the line of salt that Dean had laid out earlier.

'If that even did a thing outside of making a mess out of Henry's carpet,' Piper thought as she fell back into the living room and caught herself on Henry's armchair. She guessed that they would all have a chance to find out in the next second or two. In the meantime, the wrist had begun to throb in regular, agonizing waves that reminded Piper of the sea and made her breath catch in her throat. She could already see that it was beginning to swell.

Billie scowled in the doorway at Piper, looking less like the girl that Piper had known by the second. Nothing in her features actually changed; it was all in her eyes. If this was the demon glaring back at Piper now, then she could see why Dean had chosen to dedicate so much of his life to fighting it. She knew from evil when she saw it by now, and evil rolled off of the thing that rested in Billie in waves, evil made the air around her seem all the darker by virtue of its proximity. And if Piper's paranoia was justified, if it did turn out that Dean was working with this thing and was not as shocked by wherever Wyatt was taking him as Piper was to turn around and discover them gone, then Piper supposed that she could draw small comfort from the fact that he was clearly out of his mind.

She _could_, anyway. Piper still didn't actually see that happening.

The demon in Billie only glared at Piper for a moment longer before she (or perhaps it) extended its arm and with a terrible, leisurely slowness, as if it had nowhere else to be that night and could continue playing this game for as long as Piper was willing, began to push at the air around the threshold. It rippled, stretched and shone like cellophane wrap, and even made a high whining sound that reminded Piper of an animal in pain, but it held. For now. She realized that she was staring in a mixture of horror and fascination for nearly a full minute and had been doing so for nearly a fully minute while Billie continued to struggle and snarl. Piper took a quick step backwards and cast a wild look at Henry. If Paige had been present, or Leo before he lost his powers, then they could all be one thousand miles away within the blinking of an eye. Not for the first time and surely not for the last, Piper was caught wondering if she would have been better off with more magic in her life or less.

Apparently deciding that the barriers were just going to continue stretching but would not break, Billie drew her hand back and flashed Piper a sweet smile. It took longer to reach her mouth than it did her eyes, as if she was having to pause in order to flip through an instruction manual for a mouth that was not her own. Piper found herself actually feeling the embryonic stirrings of pity for what Billie must be experiencing, trapped within her body and watching all of this, but squashed it quickly before it could grow and hamstring her.

"Piper," Billie cooed, wrinkling her lips back in a smile that revealed more canine than was necessary. The resemblance to a dog did even more to bury the first reawakening of Piper's better nature than a boot to the face would have managed. Billie sing-songed her name again. "Where's the flash, Pi-per? I was expecting better of a former Charmed One." She put a delicate stress upon the word 'former' that made all of the hair on the back of Piper's neck stand up and convinced her even more that if Billie was still in there, then at the very least she was not acting without help. Even in her worst moments, Billie had wielded her malice like a hammer, not like a scalpel. "Why aren't you using your magic? Could it be that you were selfish all those years and drained it all away?" Billie leaned forward, pushing her face right up against the barrier that prevented her from crossing the threshold. It made her look like the world's biggest and most frightening child with her nose against a glass door. "Maybe if you and your sisters hadn't always been violating that nasty little 'no personal gain' clause, you all would have had enough juice left to save yourselves, and you would have been able to save Leo." Billie jerked her head abruptly to one side: from child to insect. She was going to run through the entire animal kingdom before she was finished talking. "I would have liked to kill the Charmed Ones."

Aching wrist or not, Piper flicked both of her hands out before she could stop herself.. With his arms wrapped around her neck and his legs around her waist, Chris hung from the front of her shirt as if he was in a papoose while Piper slammed the door shut with so much force that it nearly fell off of its hinges. The shriek that the Billie-thing let out as the door caught her full in the face was the sweetest sound that Piper had heard all night.

"I never liked that bitch," Piper said, turning back to Henry and trusting that he was too much a gentleman to mention the tears in her eyes or the way that her voice shook. She put her arms back around Chris for her own comfort as much as for his.

Henry stared at her, then nodded to his closed front door. A fine crack ran from the top all the way down to the floor. "Didn't know that you could do that."

"Neither did I," Piper said, staring herself. "I usually blow things up." With all of the force that she had hurled at the door, it could be argued that what she had done wasn't that far off, but the idea of being able to control the molecular manipulations to a large degree was still an intoxicating one. Piper promised herself that she would do a better job of entertaining it as soon as someone wasn't trying to kill her and realized that this could easily mean that she would be holding target practice when both of her boys were in high school. "Telekinesis was Prue's thing, not mine." When Henry looked confused, Piper flashed a tight-lipped smile even though she was shocked to realize that, after a year, she had not talked about Prue at all. She and Henry barely managed to talk about Paige, most days. "Charmed Ones don't live long lives."

A thump that would have shattered bone if it had hit either one of them rolled out from the door. Piper winced. "Hope you weren't too fond of your lawn mower," she said when the sound of rolling machine parts faded away. "I'm pretty sure that Billie just threw it against the door."

Henry shook his head as he picked up the phone. "It can be replaced," he said shortly. After punching a few buttons, he shook his head and set it back down. "Girl knows her horror movies." He tried the same thing with his cellular phone, and Piper watched as his expression grew dark. "Girl _really_ knows her horror movies."

"Girl's not really a girl anymore," Piper replied. She watched as Henry slid another glance towards the front door, his eyes flinty and cold, and wondered if she had been wearing that same expression only moments before. "Much as I want it to be, that's not Billie at the controls. It's something different."

A muscle in Henry's jaw ticked as he asked, "Can Billie still feel in there, do you think?"

Piper stroked Chris's hair and made a shushing sound as he shivered. "I didn't say that we were going to be wearing kid gloves." She looked towards the front door, wondering what was going on when nothing else was thrown. Good things had rarely happened when Billie was quiet and out of sight, even before the possession. "Back door?" Piper asked Henry tightly. With a little luck, Billie would not be waiting to hop down on them from the roof.

Henry shook his head. "First thing's first. I have a gun in the bedroom."

Piper had been starting to follow him as he turned in that direction. She stopped in her tracks, jaw falling open, at the first mention of the weapon. "A _gun_?" she repeated after him, sure that some kind of wacky magical hijinks must be interfering with his hearing. "A gun? With the boys coming and going all the time?"

Henry barely glanced back at her. "It's unloaded and locked up," he said over his shoulder at her. "And I keep it in the top of the closet. The boys can't reach it."

"Maybe not normal boys," Piper insisted as she followed him. "But I don't have normal boys. Wyatt, in case you didn't notice, just teleported a grown man to God knows where, and he can orb just about anything else to him that he can think of, do you think that he couldn't get through a locked box?" Piper could hear a shrewish note entering her voice, but could not bring herself to stop or care.

"_Piper_." Henry stopped in the hallway and stopped so that he could face her. "Wyatt would have to know that the gun was there to begin with, and since you didn't even know that it was there, I wasn't really worried. Second, I deal with a lot of people in my job who screwed up once and need help getting a second chance. I also deal with a lot of people who are bad and have no intention of getting better. Coming after their parole officer has seemed like a good plan to more than a few."

Piper's jaw dropped even further. "I didn't know that," she said finally. Henry had been shot that one time at the bank when one of his parolees had flipped out, but he and Paige had always treated that as a fluke, and of course there had been the ever-present magical complications involved.

"Everyone's had a lot to deal with this year," Henry said as he led Piper into his bedroom and pulled two lockboxes down from his closet. The first box had the body of the gun, the second the clip. Piper pressed her lips together firmly to keep herself from protesting further and pulled Chris even closer against her. The snicking sound as Henry put the clip into place was one of the worst that she had ever heard.

"You're family, Piper," Henry said. He looked down at the gun for a moment, addressing it rather than her, before he finally met her eyes. "That's why I don't mind arguing with you every now and then. But I'm not one of your sisters. You don't get to have the same say in what I do that you had with Phoebe and Paige."

'Well, my sisters never kissed me, either,' Piper thought about saying, and bit it back in the nick of time. That would be too waspish, even for her worst moments. She watched as Henry finished assembling the weapon instead and said, "I threw Billie into a fire and she doesn't have so much as a mark on her. I don't think that shooting her is going to solve our problem."

Henry flashed her a tight smile. "It might distract her so that you and Chris can get away." When Piper continued to stare at him as if she did not quite understand, he added gently. "Family."

"Family," Piper repeated after him, nodding. "Okay." She still knew that that there was disgust marking her face as she eyed the gun in Henry's hands, and she vowed that when it came down to it, it would be her magic that would deal with Billie and the thing inside of her.

Henry put his hand against the small of Piper's back as he guided her from the room. Piper let it stay there, even though it was making her skin itch just to be touched. He was right about family, at least. Piper had no doubt that Paige, Phoebe, or Prue would have killed to protect her if it had come down to it, and Piper herself had come very close to killing Billie immediately after Phoebe and Paige had died. Likewise, she also knew that they would have done anything that it took to keep her from becoming a killer herself. Piper eyed the gun in Henry's hands and muttered the spell that she had been working on beneath her breath. The air around her thickened and stretched, making Piper think that she might pull it off, before it all went back to normal again. She was not strong enough.

Piper would have to do something about that.

The room was growing unaccountably warm as Henry stopped Piper by touching her lightly on her wrist. A line of sweat ran down his temple, and the beads that were collecting beneath his eyes only highlighted the dark circles there. Piper did not think that his sleep had been restive even before she had shown up with the kids and Dean. "Do you feel that?" Henry asked her.

She did, and her eyes widened in response. "Where's your fire extinguisher?" Piper asked Henry. She craned her head up to look at the ceiling, where the flames had started the last time. If the demon had its way, the night would end with her pinned among them.

Henry looked at her with the same mixture of shock and compassion that he would have shown to anyone who had carried such a heavy burden for such a long time before finally experiencing the snap that put them in the mental hospital. "What?" he asked her. "Piper, what are you talking about?"

"The fire extinguisher!" Piper repeated with considerably less patience than she had shown the first time around, so that Henry even flinched and took a small step backwards. She needed both of her hands free in order to freeze any flames that cropped up, but she was loathe to hand Chris over to Henry while he was still holding that gun. "This is how it began the last time," Piper elaborated as she continued to circle and look up at the ceiling.

The confusion dropped away from Henry's face between one second and the next, and left her looking at a completely different person. "Go," he said, putting his hand against the small of Piper's back so that he could usher her from the room again. Much as Piper's nerves were running high and she did not want to be touched at the moment, she let it stay.

Henry might have had angry parolees coming after him more often than he had previously let on, but Piper had heard the sound of shattering glass many times before and knew what it meant now. "Get down!" she shrieked, ducking without waiting to see if Henry was going to do the same and clutching Chris to her tightly. She shielded his head from shrapnel while he began to scream in terror all over again. It seemed as if he had been crying for most of the day, and Piper's heart broke. Mothers were supposed to be able to do something to keep their children from being this terrified. And making it even worse…

'So help me, God, Dean, you had better bring Wyatt home safely,' Piper thought to herself. 'Because if you don't…' She didn't allow herself to finish. Piper already knew what she was capable of doing, and when it came to avenging or protecting the people that she cared about, that amounted to a great deal. Even killing, she knew now, as her thoughts drifted to where Billie was likely stalking in circles around the house now.

Henry had been around magic long enough to know by now that when the witch dropped down to the floor it was probably a good idea for the normal person to follow suit, but he still dropped a second late. From the corner of her eye, Piper saw glittering shards as the window exploded inwards and the long lick of flame that followed. She shrieked as a hot wind flew all of her hair forward and into her eyes, causing Chris to yell that much louder at the obvious sound of his mother's distress, and smelled her own hair singing. Piper let go of Chris with one hand so that she could beat quickly at the embers before they managed to set her entire long, thick mane on fire. She heard Henry yell at the same time. Piper rolled over as soon as she felt that it was safe, still clutching Chris to her chest even though he had his arms wrapped around her neck so tightly that she could scarcely breathe and thought that it would be hours before she managed to pry him free again.

The fire had looked like a living thing as it had arced through the shattered window, like an arm that would grab at Piper and Chris and drag them both straight out onto the lawn, since Billie could not come inside. Piper did not know what Billie intended to do once she got her there. Pin her to the trees in Henry's yard, perhaps. It still looked alive as it now began to crawl over the ceiling, eating up the plaster far faster than any normal fire had a right to do, long orange fingers reaching out to lick at the far walls. There came a series of identical sounds from several other windows in Henry's house as they followed suit, whether from magical interference or the accumulation of heat Piper could not say. She felt as if she was standing in the center of a brick oven, and there was a river of sweat running down her spine. Piper stared up at the flaming ceiling, slack-jawed in awe, and could not look away until she heard Henry moan in pain.

Piper thought that if her jaw managed to fall open any further, it was going to unhinge altogether and leave her gaping like a snake, but somehow she kept finding a way. Henry was crouching on the carpet several feet away from Piper, struggling to protect his hair from the falling embers with one arm and hold himself up with the other, even though Piper could see his elbow trembling from the effort. A second later, he turned and Piper could see why. Henry had hurled himself to the ground a second after hearing Piper shout, which had likely saved his life when the fire had gone cracking through the room in a flash of smoke and heat. His hesitation, however, had allowed the fire to get in a kiss even if it had not been able to claim him with a full embrace, and it had left its mark. Henry had an ugly burn, easily third degree, crawling from his shoulder and up to his neck, and ending at a place just beneath his ear. The skin had already begun to turn the color of freshly cooked lobster in some places, blackened and cracked in others, and with fat, watery blisters the size of Piper's thumb in all of the places in between. The fire had taken him on his gun arm, and in his pain he had thrown the weapon away from himself and into the farthest corner of the room. Flames were already crawling down the walls towards it as if they could not wait to claim their shiny new toy. What was worse than anything else, though, was to look at Henry's leather jack and see the places where, rather than being burned away altogether, the edges had actually been melted into his skin.

Piper made sure that Chris had a good grip on her and would not fall before she scuttled quickly over to Henry's side. There was a hissing noise, almost a whine, rising over the crackling of the fire. After a second Piper realized that it was Henry, struggling to keep breathing between his tightly clenched teeth. He jumped when Piper put her hand onto his healthy shoulder.

"Oh, my God," Piper breathed when she saw the full extent of the damage that had been done. She brought her hand up to cover her mouth. When Henry opened his eyes, there were tears of pain standing out in them.

"Give Chris to me," Henry whispered at long last. His voice was raspy and ill used, as if the scream that clearly wanted out was resting just below his voice box and it was everything that he could do to keep it down even that far.

Piper shook her head, sure that Henry was in so much pain that he did not know what he was saying. "Come on," she said, sliding her shoulder beneath his, "we can climb out of the window."

"No, we can't," Henry said. He was looking out the bedroom window rather than at her. Craning her neck to follow his gaze, Piper thought that she saw a flash of gold hair, but among the flames she could not be sure. "And anyway-" Henry tried to move his burned arm, and went paler than the sheets on his own bed. Piper was sure that that scream was finally going to find its way free before he managed to force it back down again. "I can't climb over that windowsill. We have to go right out the front door." Henry looked her in the eye. He was breathing hard, but his voice was steady. "You're going to need both of your hands free."

Truer words had never been spoken. Piper took several deep breaths until she felt calmer and handed Chris over to Henry. Chris cried that much harder, clinging to her neck until Piper thought that she was going to become the first person in history to be strangled by her own toddler.

"Shh, shh, shh," Piper murmured to him in order to quiet his cries. She pulled him close to her again so that she could stroke at his hair. It was still so soft, his and Wyatt's both, almost as fine as it had been on the days that she had brought them home from the hospital. It wasn't fair, she thought, it wasn't fair that they were growing up so fast and so much had changed, all the while there could be so much left behind to remind Piper of the babies that they had been. "It's going to be all right, Chris, Mommy's here, Mommy's going to keep you safe." Piper closed her eyes so that Henry would not see the tears that were pricking them suddenly. "I promise you, Mommy will keep you safe." And Mommy would find a way to keep Wyatt safe, and Mommy would find a way to get Henry to the hospital, and while she was at it, Mommy would find a way to bring Leo and Paige and Phoebe back, and Prue, also, and even Cole, since she was so busy performing miracles and the list of the dead ran for so long. "I just need for Henry to carry you right now. Come on, you know Henry, you know that he's a good guy." Piper felt the arms around her neck loosen by a fraction, just enough so that she could pull him away from her chest without gagging.

"Hey, buddy, you know you're all right with me," Henry said as he took Chris with his good arm. Even that movement made his entire body go rigid with pain, but he recovered quickly. Henry gave Piper and her hands a significant look as soon as he had Chris settled against his hip. Chris had apparently been through enough that day so that he was pretty equal opportunity in who he clung to, as within seconds he was gripping Henry's neck every bit as hard as he had held Piper's.

Piper scarcely nodded before she raised her hands towards the ceiling and let the magic course through her. It was only at the last moment that she remembered that her goal was to freeze, not to blow the roof right off and halfway across the street. Piper really thought that she deserved to blow something up.

In spite of her intention to freeze rather than hurling a pure, raw charge at it that would scatter embers in all directions and make the inferno that much worse, the force with which the power traveled through her was still enough to make her vision first double and then triple. If had not done that since she had first discovered her powers. The tips of Piper's fingers tingled and her mouth fell open in a soft gasp, but the fire above her head froze like a giant, terrifying relief painting. She spun and fired off several more shots at the walls, freezing the fingers of flame that were beginning to crawl down them as well, before she turned back to Henry. He obviously needed help in getting back to his feet. The problem lay in finding a way to touch him that would not only hurt him worse.

"I got it," Henry told her finally, waving off her attempts to help. He held Chris against his chest with his good arm, put his bad one against the wall, and pushed himself back up to his feet. Henry's face bled free of color with the pain as he clenched his teeth together tightly to avoid crying out with the pain and began to sway back and forth so alarmingly that Piper did not even see how he was still standing. She ducked herself quickly beneath his bad arm before could fall, wincing along with him as he let out a strangled noise. Piper could feel his heart hammering wildly through the thin, sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt.

"I'm okay," Henry said after several long moments, and untangled himself from Piper as well as he could without hurting himself further. He was still listing from side to side like a willow tree in a strong wind. Piper feared that it would not take more than a strong nudge to topple him. It hurt to look at him for more than a few seconds at a time.

Piper shook out her still tingling hands and glanced once more at the ceiling before she led Henry out the door. She had not been able to vanquish the demon in Billie earlier, though she had been able to throw her back several yards and into a fire that should still have been able to do some damage, and this was a thought that still hung in the back of her mind and troubled her. Piper could still throw Billie hard enough and far enough to make her head ring, though, that she had _proved_. The idea of tossing Billie down the street and bouncing her from one car to the next was one that cheered Piper up far more than it had any right to.

"Piper!" someone yelled from the living room, a male voice that still cracked with panic, almost like a child's. It could have been relief that flooded through Piper's veins as she recognized the voice as Dean's or it could have been nothing more than adrenaline from her seemingly endless supply, but it was still enough to throw Piper straight to the top of a high, giddy wave. Her knees wavered beneath her for a moment, and she grabbed at the doorframe for support. "Chris!" the voice continued.

"Oh, thank God," Piper whispered beneath her breath as she let go of the doorframe and straightened. "De-" The smoke entered her lungs, choking her and making her doubled over on a fit of coughing. Before she could gather her breath to try again, the ceiling above her erupted once more into a roar of crackling noises and a wall of heat. Her hand still over her mouth, Piper whirled around to see that the fire that she had frozen only moments before had burst into life again. "How the hell?" Piper muttered in disbelief, only to hurl herself to the side a second later as a lick of flame, nearly sentient, curled down and struck against the carpet in the very place where she had been standing. Henry dodged in the other direction, shielding Chris's body from stray embers with his own. Chris's continued shrieking, begun again after scarcely a moment's respite, was the loudest sound in the room. A wave of heat pressed Piper flat to the floor, tendrils of sweat hair clinging to her face and a line of small blisters breaking out from her cheekbone down to her nose. There was a little room to breathe down here by the floor, away from the smoke that was turning the rest of the room into a thick black haze, and Piper inhaled deeply before she looked up again. Any hopes she might have been entertaining that her eyes had been playing cruel jokes on her were dashed as she saw the fire continuing to blaze away happily. There was a loud cracking sound from one corner of the room that made Piper think of two planks being slammed together.

Piper had heard guns going off before, had even on a few memorable occasions actually had one fired at her. She still did not connect the dots on the sound that she heard until it was followed by several more even louder in volume and by Henry calling out sharply, "Piper, stay down!" Several more staccato sounds occurred in quick succession, like…like all of the bullets left in a gun going off after being superheated in just a few minutes time. Piper shrieked and threw both of her hands over her head as she swore that something passed over her hair closely enough to leave a red mark across her knuckles. She lunged back up to her feet as soon as there was a break in the bullet-fire, ignoring Henry yelling at her to stay where she was.

"We have to get out of here before the whole place comes down!" Piper yelled back in the loudest voice that she could manage. A final bullet cracked through the air, causing Piper to gasp and duck. The air was thicker than ever, hot and actually gritty as it slid down her throat. It was all that Piper could do to manage a regular speaking voice, let alone a yell. The room was filled with swirling smoke; she could barely even see her own hand in front of her face, let alone Henry or Chris. From the living room, Piper heard the sound of a great deal of glass breaking, and then Wyatt joined his brother in shrieking as loudly as he was capable. Among the indecipherable slew of words came one, said over and over again: "Mommy!"

"Mommy," Piper mouthed along with Wyatt before she began staggering along blindly back towards the door. Henry grabbed for her elbow out of the smoke and nearly got himself hurled against the wall before Piper collected herself and realized who he was. Piper directed the blast towards the fire again instead, freezing it, only for it to begin to whirl and dance once more mere seconds later. She kept herself from gaping only by an extreme act of will and instead listened as her eldest sound continued to scream form the living room, sure that Henry was about to try to talk her down from doing something foolish. Like rushing into the living room and throwing Billie into the wall instead.

"Cover your head," was all that Henry said before he released her elbow so that she could go. Chris and Wyatt were screaming in rhythm with one another, like the wailing of the fire engines that could come racing down Henry's street any moment now.

Piper bolted from the bedroom and down the hallway in spite of the fact that she could hardly breathe, let alone see, and ignoring every scrap of conventional wisdom that told her to crawl in order to avoid the worst of the smoke inhalation. That would not be nearly fast enough. She could hear Henry's feet pounding close behind her.

Piper was not sure what it was that staggered her more as she reached the living room at last, the relatively clean air that filled her burning, twitching lungs or the sight of her son, alive and whole and unharmed. All of the windows in Henry's living room were broken, and Dean was desperately trying to shove Wyatt out of one of the windows and into what he thought was the safety of the front lawn. Wyatt was struggling fiercely against him, drumming his heels against the windowsill and screaming, "Mommy!" over and over again. There was already blood running down his wrist from where he had cut himself on the window frame.

"Dean!" Piper yelled across the living room. Dean spun around with such speed that he nearly dropped Wyatt altogether when he heard the sound of Piper's voice, his eyes going wide when he realized that she was real and not a phantom. If Dean looked as if he had seen a ghost, then Piper was a ghost that he had been hoping and praying to see, and he did not know how to respond once he had found her.

"Piper?" Dean asked her, almost as if he thought that she would say that, no, she was really Stephanie from down the street. He shook his head, and the focus came back into his face, his eyes, leaving him cold and hard in return. "How-"

A huge chunk of Henry's plaster ceiling came down between them with a roaring sound that was more like water than fire. Piper threw out her hands without thinking, a flash of magic that left her briefly dazzled while she was still running mostly on adrenaline and the refusal to lie down and die. The mess of plaster and flame froze in the air, the sparks cast out in a circle around them. Piper saw Dean's mouth fall open in shock for a moment, but he shook his head and recovered quickly. "You gotta get-get Chris out of here, he's the one that it wants!" Dean's face was red with the effort that it took just to keep breathing and he was still weaving back and forth. For a moment it was not Chris's name that Dean began to shout, before his lips clamped shut around the words.

Piper shook her head, but her throat closed and her voice failed her while her body took a moment to decide if she was really fit to continue leading it around. She spit out a mouthful of phlegm that tasted strongly of ash and made her nose burn before she continued, willing Dean to get it. "No, you don't understand," she said, only to pause midway through so that she could indulge in a coughing fit that made her ribs ache and set her to wondering if she was about to see her own lungs splattered across Henry's carpet. When she could, she straightened and looked Dean in the eye. "_The fire started outside_."

There was no flash of epiphany moving across Dean's face, no sign that he understood the full extent of what she was telling him. Piper's attention was drawn next to the flash of gold that she saw moving just outside of the window, scuttling so low to the ground that she could barely be seen at all over the sill. The blonde in Billie's hair caught the flames and threw them back in motes of pure gold. Piper's lips curled back from her teeth; she knew that she looked like a dog and did not care. Before she could shout a warning, Billie's hands were reaching across the sill, grabbing Dean around his throat, and jerking him back against the frame so hard that Piper was no sure which would crack first, the wood or his spine. For only a second, Billie's arms were encased in a shiny covering almost like cling-wrap before she tore through with an audible ripping sound. The fingers around Dean's neck flexed and tightened as he gagged.

Dean let go of Wyatt with so little care that it was a wonder that Wyatt was able to catch himself at all. Piper saw Dean mouth the word, "Go," at Wyatt, saw Wyatt pause with his face turned up and his mouth twisted in worry before something within the boy broke. He raced back across the living room, dodged the eerie frozen spectacle of the frozen plaster, and leapt into Piper's arms. She fell to her knees so that she could receive him, and even so the force of a tearful, dive-bombing four year-old was nearly enough to knock her straight onto her ass. Piper wrapped her arms around him every bit as hard as he was clinging to her, as hard as she had been pressing Chris to her chest only a short time before. It was several seconds before she remembered that her son just might want to breathe. Piper forced her arms to loosen, only for Wyatt to cry and worm against her that much harder. Behind her, his brother continued to scream in one unending wail. Piper knew that Dean needed her to rise to her feet and come to his aid, but it was so hard to remember that when she had her baby pressed against her again. Thoughts of revenge were exposed for the ridiculous, petty things that they were when she had her lips against the crown of his head.

It was the crack of a gunshot that made Piper's head snap up again. She had not noticed the gun in Dean's hand until then. She did not think that he noticed it now. His face was both devastated and devastating as he stared down at Billie, still alive and pink and whole, and mouthed words that Piper could not make out. Billie put her hand against Dean's chest and hurled him backwards so hard that his feet seemed to actually leave the floor. He did not stop until he collided with Henry's coffee table hard enough to snap one of the legs clean away and make Piper wince in sympathy.

Billie grinned down at Dean where he was gaping at her in horror. "Yes," she said, "but you're the one who had to go and make it all personal. Tit for tat, as they say." She lifted her head finally so that she could make eye contact with Piper at last. Their eyes locked, and Piper felt a surge of the hatred that she had been so sure that she had released moments before, rancid and sour after it had been locked up for so long with no hope of reaching its target. Her entire body began to tingle; the rest of the room receded away to leave only Billie, crouching on the windowsill and grinning across the room at Piper like she had a right to be there, like the fact that she kept taking Piper's families and destroying them meant nothing to her at all. "Hello, Piper," she cooed.

Piper straightened from her crouch slowly, and never once let her eyes waver from Billie's. She had to struggle for a moment to make Wyatt release his grip upon her blouse, only for him to slide down and wrap his arms around her knee just as hard. Piper's hands were trembling, she was clenching them into fists so hard, wanting to vanquish Billie so much that if she had given in she likely would have thrown Billie straight through Henry's wall and through the neighbor's as well. Billie's knees were bent back at an angle that she could not have possibly managed if she had still been human as she crouched on the sill, encouraging Piper even further, until she remembered how little effect her last attempt to vanquish Billie had had. One family was more than enough. Billie was not going to get to take another because Piper could not keep herself together.

"Over my dead body you are going to take Chris, Billie," Piper said, unable to stop herself from using Billie's real name even through she knew that the thing crouching on the windowsill was not Billie any longer and likely had not been for some time. She was still shaking with the need to lunge forward and wrap her hands around Billie's throat. "Or did you forget how well trying to take my boys' power worked for you the last time?"

Billie's laugh made Piper wonder if someone had not already beaten her to the punch when it came to Billie's throat. It had a thick quality to it, as if her voice box had been crushed. "Keep him," she said, and made a negligent flicking gesture.

Piper felt a hand the size of a ham come down upon the collar of her blouse and jerk her backwards so hard that she gagged from the force of the fabric catching her throat. Piper slammed against the wall and began to rebound down to the ground again, only to have another visible hand slam her against the wall once more, hard enough to send flakes of plaster cascading into her hair. She wheezed Dean's name around her bruised ribs as she saw him begin to rush to her aid, only to get flung back against the other wall, and flicked out her hands. The flames that scuttled up and down the wall froze a split-second before dean would have been immolated in them.

Wyatt had refused to release his grip upon Piper's knee even as she was jerked backwards, so that eh was bounced off of the wall every bit as hard as Piper herself. He made a thumping noise as she fell off of her and to the ground. Wyatt had stopped screaming, as Chris was continuing to do in Henry's arm only a few yards away in defiance of the room's limited oxygen supply, and was crying without making a sound. Piper sobbed out her son's name and tried to reach for him, grunting and struggling against the invisible hands, but she could not even raise her wrists from the wall. Henry tried to rush to her aid, only to be hurled away and into the wall with one of the most terrible sounds that she had ever heard before in her life. He did not move again.

'I'm going to kill you,' Piper thought, staring across the room at the thing that wore Billie's face. They eyes were clearer and sharper than Billie's had ever been and the bones beneath the skin shifted and rolled into new shapes that almost, but not quite, approximated a human face, as if Billie herself was nothing more than an ill-fitting mask that was beginning to wear out and was on the verge of being thrown away altogether. 'Before I let you come near my sons again, I am going to put my hands around your throat, and I am going to squeeze until you're not there anymore.' Piper meant the promise more than she had meant anything else in her life, perhaps even her wedding vows.

Billie's face twitched into a frown long enough to make Piper wonder if the ability to read minds was not also included among the demon's powers. It wrenched her away from the wall one final time and then slammed her back again, hard enough to knock the back of her head against the plaster, leaving her dazed and dangling. She lived within a gray haze for several seconds, until she heard her son scream as he was dragged into the center of the room.

Not Chris. Wyatt. Piper felt her mouth fall open, and she gaped for a moment before she recovered herself and to fight and kick as hard as she was capable, ignoring the pounding in her head and the urge to retch that was rising in her. "No," Piper grunted beneath her breath, "no, no, no." She slammed her heels into the wall with enough force to leave deep dents behind. _Not_ Wyatt. Not either of them, not while there was a single drop of blood left within her body, but not Wyatt. Not after they had fought so hard, not after she knew that he had such a tremendous capacity in him for good.

Because he also had a tremendous capacity for evil. Other mothers could pretend that their children were filled with nothing but good; Piper could not. She bit savagely into her own lower lip to keep herself from crying.

'I'm going to kill you,' Piper thought again, and wondered if maybe Wyatt's resemblance to his father was not more superficial than she had previously thought. She hardly noticed when Dean launched himself away from the floor one final time and tackled Billie hard around her midsection, so fixated was she on the terrified boy that she could not reach, until the cold, invisible hands that were keeping her pinned to the wall vanished and allowed her to fall back to the floor. There was a terrible, wet _sliding_ noise from her stomach that reminded her of a zipper being drawn down, though the pain was in a class that defied all of Piper's previous experiences. She clenched her teeth together hard to keep from screaming, heard her breath whistling. Chris rushed over to her immediately, smearing blood all over himself as he launched himself into her midsection without regard for the deep wound that ran across her gut. Piper wrapped one hand around him, tried to hold the edges of her skin together, and called Henry's name in an increasingly strident tone of voice. He began to kick his feet sluggishly, but did not wake.

Wyatt remained in the exact same place where the demon had dragged him, his hands over his face. He did not so much as twitch in response to all of Piper's attempts to capture his attention again.

Piper jerked her head towards Dean and saw, to her mixed horror and jealousy, that he had reversed the gun in his hands so that he was now holding it by the barrel and was bringing the butt of it down again and again on Billie's face. 'I'm going to kill you.' Piper watched for a few moments more, noting the way that the blood was flicking up from the gun to stain Dean's knuckles and wrist before she called out, "Dean."

The sound of his own name made Dean react as if he had received a physical blow. He leaned back and stared down at the body that he was crouching over, which was by now making only the most spastic of movements. Piper craned her neck so that she could look at what was left of the face, only to glance away again quickly. Her experience as a Charmed One kept her from being sick, as she had seen much worse over the years, but her experience as a cook was for once working against rather than for her. Billie's face bore an unfortunate resemblance to strawberry jam.

Dean rolled away from Billie, and Piper released the freeze that she had cast onto the mess of plaster and flames. It crashed down on Billie, smothering her in fire. Piper only wished that she could believe that they were getting anything other than a temporary reprieve. "Lean on me," Dean instructed her as he knelt by her side. He could not look her in the eyes, almost as if he was afraid of what he would find there.

"I can stand." Piper was trying to keep her voice low and gentle, the way that she might when dealing with a frightened animal. Mostly, she thought that she just sounded tired and sick, with a quaver in her voice that she could not bring back under her control. "Go help Henry." Dean looked her in the eyes at last. The cold, the darkness, that had driven him across the room and into beating Billie senseless was gone, and the green was warm again. He looked frightened and younger than a man in his late twenties, and for a moment it was all that Piper could do not to reach out and cup his face. She would only smear more blood across his cheek, when they were both covered in so much of it as it was.

"Wyatt," Piper called when Dean had left her so that he could go help Henry back to his feet. Wyatt turned finally at the sound of her voice so that he could look at her with large, haunted eyes. He had stopped crying. If not for the tear tracks on his face, it would be easy to believe that his red-rimmed eyes were a result of the smoke and the heat. Piper felt tears springing into her eyes all over again and put one of her hands over her mouth, never mind that she could now taste her own blood spreading across her tongue and teeth. "Baby, come here."

As if there had been a chain around Wyatt's ankle that had been unlocked suddenly, Wyatt launched himself up from the singed carpet and rushed over to Chris, throwing his arms around him and squeezing him until Chris had to stop screaming and squeaked instead. After a moment, he took his brother's hand and led him over to Piper so that he could hug her instead. He clung to her more gently than Chris had, but Piper could still feel his arms trembling with the need to climb into her lap as if he was still a baby. Piper lowered her face into his hair and smelled that clean baby scent, incongruous with the stoic miniature adult that he was turning into so far ahead of his age, and dropped a kiss onto the crown of his head. She then unwrapped her arm from around her midsection and, hanging onto Chris with her other hand, used Wyatt for a few seconds in order to push herself back up to her feet. He withstood it like a half-sized soldier, his expression unchanging.

Blood whooshed from the wound as soon as Piper took the pressure of her forearm off of it, soaking the front of her blouse and her jeans. Swirls of purple and yellow danced along the edges of Piper's vision, and there was a roaring sound in her ears that temporarily blotted out all other sound. Piper staggered and probably would have fallen if not for the two small boys at her side. She closed her eyes and struggled to stay conscious while most of the blood in her body seemed to be raining down onto Henry's carpet. When she opened them again, both Henry and Dean were standing in front of her. "I'll lead," Henry was saying.

Dean glanced to the pile of rubble where, if there was any justice in the universe at all, Billie was turning into a charcoal briquette in spite of the fact that fire had had little effect on her before. He looked as if there was nothing that he wanted to do more than lunge into the fire himself, and as if nodding his acquiescence was the hardest thing that he had ever done. The group of them staggered out of the house and into the cool, sweet air that was the best that Piper had ever breathed before in her life. She dropped to her knees with her boys on either side of her as soon as they were a safe distance away on the lawn. Piper leaned over and began to retch, as she felt as if she had been forced to swallow the contents of a used fireplace, and at long last heard the sounds of an approaching fire truck. The entire encounter had taken less than fifteen minutes from its beginning to its end.

Piper's nerves were still wound so tightly that when she first felt hands along her back and shoulders, she was convinced that it was Billie struggling free from the flames, and it was all that she could do not to spin around and take a swing at her. "Piper," Dean whispered behind her, his voice raspy and hoarse from the smoke. Piper felt first a hand touching her hair, then her face, before something inside her broke and she pressed her face forward and against the side of Dean's neck. "Come on, we gotta leave before it digs out."

Right. Leave. Run. Piper had trouble processing all of these thoughts, had trouble processing any thoughts at all, as she looked around at all of the damage that had been wrought. She didn't like this, this feeling of being a victim, and as she wracked her brain she could only think of one thing that separated this from every other battle that she had fought before. "This isn't the right place," she muttered. It was not the right place and, more importantly, was not the right frame of mind. A whole year's worth of not being in the right frame of mind, frankly. When Piper thought of it, it was almost enough to make her sick.

"Leave," she told Dean abruptly as the sound of the approaching firefighters finally pierced through her fog. "Now."

Dean jerked away from her so fast that she nearly tumbled back down to grass as she realized for the first time how much she had been leaning on him. "What?" The green eyes were filled with hurt, that terrible cold nowhere in evidence. 'Save it up,' Piper wanted to tell him. 'You're going to need every drop, because I don't think that magic alone is going to be enough.' No more than it had been for Phoebe, or for Paige, or for Leo.

Instead, Piper reached out and touched his face gently, taking his chin gently so that eh could not runt his face away. They were both so covered in blood that it no longer mattered what marks they left on each other. "I trust you, Dean," Piper said, wishing that she was not sporting such a whiskey voice at the moment, so that she would sound more sincere and less as if Dean was about to be propositioned by Brigitte Bardot. "But the police don't, and this is the second fire today where a mysterious stranger has come to my rescue."

Whatever arguments that Dean might have been harboring died in his throat. He glanced over his shoulder at the house for a moment before he nodded once, pushed himself back up to his feet, and rushed for his car. Piper waited until he had driven away before she collapsed back onto the lawn, her eyelids fluttering downwards. The first of the firefighters reached her a few moments later.

End Part Eight


	9. Chapter 9

Part Nine

Piper did not pass out until she was already in the ambulance and had given the EMT Victor's name and phone number. The last sound that she heard was of one of her sons continuing to cry, while the other maintained an eerie, worrying silence.

At the hospital, she took a swing at a doctor when he pulled the boys away, though she would not remember it later. Neither would she remember the fifty-seven stitches that were put into her stomach, and Piper guessed that that was a good thing.

The next event that she actually did remember was waking up in a hospital bed, the skin across her stomach feeling pinched and tight, her head swimming in dizzy, sick circles, and discovering both a police officer and her father standing over her bed. She put her hand over her hospital gown and felt the hard little ridges caused by the threads holding her skin together. "I wasn't pregnant," Piper said slowly. Her thoughts were disjointed, scattered across every corner of her brain, and it was a struggle to force them to come back together again. She looked up at Victor. "Was I pregnant?"

Victor exchanged a glance with the police officer. "They have her on a lot of pain medication," he said. "It might be best if this waited."

The police officer shook his head, though his eyes remained kind. "I really need to get her statement," he said as he pulled a chair up close to Piper's bedside. "This man could be dangerous." The officer leaned forward until he was able to make eye contact with Piper. "Mrs. Halliwell, your neighbors said that there was a second man with you as you left Mr. Mitchell's house matching the description of the man who helped you at the earlier fire?"

Piper did not know how much morphine was being sent through the IV needle in her wrist, but it vanished between one second and the next, swifter than smoke. She straightened in her bed, wincing and bracing her hand against her stomach as the stitches pulled. "No," Piper said. Behind the police officer, she saw her father straighten, but it didn't matter if he knew that she was lying. "We had a good Samaritan when the apartment caught fire, but he left." Piper hated to admit even that much, but the police had already taken her statement once earlier, when Dean had been standing right beside her. All the same, she took special care to make her voice much wispier and more confused than she was actually feeling.

The police officer looked solemn and kind. He also looked as if he was buying it. Victor, over the officer's shoulder, clearly was not. His eyes were wide, and he was making a series of gestures that either meant that she should pop out of the bed and throw a curveball, or that she should knock it off and start telling the truth. Piper chose to do neither, and instead focused hard on the officer's face so that he would not turn and learn for himself why her father was not a world class poker champion. As hard as the room still wanted to tilt back and forth like the listing of an uncooperative ship when she stopped focusing on forcing it to be still, it was not difficult to keep a slightly loopy expression on her face. She was even able to make her gasp of surprise sound convincing as the officer went on, "Ma'am, did you know that the man that you were seen with at the site of your apartment matched the description of a man wanted for murder?"

"No," Piper said. She didn't put too much effort into sounding aghast and upset; all that she had to do was picture Billie's face before her face. "What are you saying?"

"Two fires in a single day is more than a little suspicious, ma'am," the officer said, finally sounding as if he was growing exasperated by her ditziness. As long as he continued to think that she was coming by it honestly, Piper was more than happy to let him believe that that she was the second coming of Paris Hilton. "And this man could be very dangerous. If you know _anything_ more-"

"I'm sorry. I don't," Piper interrupted him. "The fire at Henry's house started outside. I didn't know that anything was wrong until the smoke detectors started to go off." Piper wanted to get off of the bed and slink beneath it, realizing that she was essentially casting Dean out to sink or swim on his own, but the alternative was to send the San Francisco Police Department out hunting for Billie. The very thought of the carnage that would follow was enough to make Piper shudder. For the first time, a suspicious line drew itself down between the officer's eyes.

"My daughter's had a very difficult couple of days, I don't think that I need to tell you that," Victor said, stepping forward quickly from where he had been hanging back near the door. His eyes were speaking volumes to her above the officer's head. Piper could not afford to make eye contract any more now than she could have a few moment's before, when she still felt as if she was using a white-knuckled grip to hold the separate pieces of herself together. "Maybe we can all have this conversation sometime when she's feeling a little more clearheaded."

The officer nodded after a long pause, though he certainly did not look happy to be doing so. "I'll come back tomorrow," he said, rising to his feet and pushing the chair back. "I can't help but get the feeling that you're not being honest with me, Mrs. Halliwell," he said. So she was not quite as good a liar as she had hoped. After so many years of lying to everyone from traffic cops to Homeland Security, she really ought to be more embarrassed by that. Piper stared the police officer straight in the eye and willed a flush not to crawl up her neck. "You need to think long and hard about what you're doing to yourself and to your family if that's the case. You could be tangled up with a very dangerous character."

"You're not telling me anything that I don't already know," Piper said, sharper than she had intended, and harsh enough to make the police officer lean back and gaze at her through fresh eyes. Whatever new picture she was causing to be painted within his mind, however, he saw fit not to voice any of those concerns now. He nodded to her once, far more stiffly than the manner with which he greeted her upon her waking, and left the room.

Victor waited until he was sure that the officer was gone before he unfolded his arms from over his chest and back towards the bed. "Piper, what's really going on?" he asked.

Rather than answering directly, Piper cast a sharp-eyed glance around the room and made note of the two small figures that were not in it. "Where are the boys?" she asked. Piper could still smell smoke whenever she turned her head, and could not quite manage to convince herself that it was only because her hair needed to be washed.

Victor would not be deterred so easily. "They're both out in the waiting room," he said, "Piper-"

"You left them alone?" While lunging out of the bed had been a foolish fantasy only a few moments earlier, it was now all that Piper could do to stop herself from leaping up and running right out the door.

"No," Victor told her, his tone becoming testy for a moment. "They're with Amelia. The woman that I'm seeing." Piper sank back against the pillows and knew that there was a look of confusion spreading across her face. "I've been seeing her for the past six months, Piper. I've told you about her on the phone several times."

Piper pulled back even further. Her heart monitor, after a single sharp spike when she had not known where the boys were, settled back into a sedate rhythm. "I forgot." She barely even remembered those conversations now.

Victor sighed, and it sounded as if it hurt him. "You didn't want to know, is what you mean," he said. "You've been walking around in a fog for the past year, Piper." She opened her mouth to protest in spite of the fact that it was something that she herself had admitted to only hours before, but he cut her off before she could go forward. "We're all that we have left. Family, whether you like it or not."

Piper closed her lips tightly around the thousand hurtful things that could have escaped her mouth and gone flying around the room, like telling Victor exactly what kind of family that he had been to her over the years. She swallowed them back with difficulty, even though they cut her throat. "Sorry." Family. That meant more than just her and the boys and maybe Henry, she reminded herself. It meant more than revenge against Billie, too, though it still hurt her to think about too long. Being _awake_ again hurt her, and not just being awake in the sense that she was no longer unconscious in her hospital bed. Colors were sharper, sounds were louder, and her head felt clearer than it had in months.

"No, you're not," Victor said. He sighed again and rubbed his hand over his face, making a rasping noise as his palm brushed against the stubble. Piper realized for the first time how tired her father looked, how tired and how _old_, and wondered how long he had actually been sitting by her bedside before she had regained consciousness. It was enough to cause a spark of guilt in her when nothing else could. "I know when one of my girls is lying to me, even now."

Piper tried to think of the last phone conversation that she had actually had with her father and guessed that it had taken place at least a month previously, and longer than that since she had seen him face to face. If she kept using so much energy on guilt, she was not going to have any left for Billie, and Billie desperately needed her attention. "So what's the verdict, then?" she asked, looking up at her father. Amelia. Piper wondered what she was like, since her dad obviously trusted her so much. "How much did I get smacked around?"

"Fifty-seven stitches, two pints of blood, and smoke inhalation," Victor said as if he was reading from a list. He was doing a good job of pretending that he was not worried, and if Piper had not noticed the stubble on his face and the fine trembling in his hands as he gripped the bed's railing, she might have believed it. "The boys had some smoke inhalation, and Wyatt needed a few stitches in his hand, but they've already been released. You've been in and out for most of the day."

"They're tough little guys," Piper said vaguely as she toyed with the edges of the hospital blanket. If she thought that her legs would hold her yet, she already would have been in the waiting room. "How's Henry?"

Victor's face shut down, letting Piper knew even before he spoke that it was a going to be a lot more in his case than a few days in the hospital, a few stitches, and a nifty new scar to go above the one from her C-section. "He's looking at some skin grafts," Victor said in a soft, soft voice. Piper thought that she might have liked it better if he had stayed angry with her. "And he might still lose some of the use in that arm."

Because he had helped her, even though he had not needed to, and because he was her family and as such had thrown himself between Billie and what the thing inside of her wanted. Piper closed her eyes and felt a few tears leaking out from beneath her lids before she was able to stop herself. Victor stopped talking abruptly in order to make a soft, shocked sound. Piper did not cry in front of him. That entire damnable last year notwithstanding, she rarely cried at all. It was a day full of firsts all around, and none of them were ones that Piper felt like getting used to.

Piper sat rigid in her hospital bed for several moments, hands clenched into fists at her sides and trying desperately to keep her few rebel tears from turning into outright sobs. The last thing that she needed was for a nurse to come racing into the room when she began to shriek, as badly as her patchwork stomach was beginning to hurt her. The displacement of weight on the edge of the bed, letting her know that her father was now sitting beside her, only made things worse. Piper put her hand against her mouth as she felt her first sob, put the other hand against her stitches as it hurt every bit as much as she had expected that it would. Very slowly and almost as if he expected that a snake was going to come lunging out of her hair and snap at him, Victor put his arm around her shoulders. His voice when he called her name was almost as hesitant. They didn't have a whole lot of experience in being a daughter or a father towards each other, and with every day that passed the chances that they would ever learn grew slimmer.

Piper only let Victor hold her, after a fashion, for a few moments before she pushed him away. Her eyes were still hot and felt as if there was sand being forced beneath the lids, but her cheeks were barely wet. She caught a glimpse of Victor's hurt look before he tucked it away again and shook her head. "It's not you. It's…I need to fall to pieces. I've needed to do it for a long time, and when I do I'm not to hold back. If I'm going to protect my boys, then I can't do it until I know that they're safe."

Victor cleared his throat and leaned away from her, though he still did not look happy about it as he did so. "You know," he said, wincing as if he already knew how ridiculous his words were going to sound, given the history between them, "you're only alone in this if you want to be."

He way trying, whether the attempt was a clumsy one or not. Maybe Amelia was a good influence on him, after all. Piper covered his hand briefly with her own. "The last person who tried to help me is waiting for a skin graft," she said. Piper would have gone on further had a flash of blue outside of the hospital room not caught her eye. Her mouth fell open. "Are those guards?"

Victor assumed a guilty look. "Believe it or not, the list of things that I needed to tell you about was so long that I didn't know where to begin."

Piper continued to gape at the officers that she could see standing just outside of the room. One of the men caught her eye and touched the brim of his hat lightly in acknowledgement. "Are they watching me or watching for Dean?"

Though Victor evidenced a moment of surprise and obvious displeasure to hear Piper referring to Dean by his first name, he pressed forward. "Dean, mostly," he said. "They think that he might have started both of those fires." Piper felt her face stiffen, though she had expected nothing else. "But you're not making a whole lot of sense, either. Given the nature of the fires and the insurance involved, it might be best if you stayed where you are."

Piper glanced towards her door and the two men standing just outside of it. "I'm a Charmed One," she replied. Emphasis on the 'One' or not, her magic was the one thing that no one had tried to take from her but herself. "I'll deal with it."

Victor looked uncomfortable at the mention of magic being used to break the law, but he chose to keep his thoughts on the matter to himself. Good for him. "Piper, are you sure that you know what you're doing?" he asked her.

Everyone kept asking her that. Piper felt herself bristling in spite of the fact that her head was still spinning from the morphine and the blood loss. Two pints, huh. The way that her entire body still felt disjointed and loose, not entirely under her control, she was still about a quart low. "Don't do this," she warned him, holding one hand out in a stopping gesture while she gripped the railing with her other hand and used it to pull herself further up in the bed. Every single stitch protested her decision to move or even to breathe too deeply at the same time, fifty-seven fire ants biting into her flesh. Much as she wanted to, Piper did not reach for the call button that would bring the nurse and more morphine to her side. Her head still barely felt as if it was screwed on all the way as it was, and she still had so much to do.

Victor colored for a moment, and Piper could see all of the things that he wanted to say to her moving behind his eyes, but he swallowed them back down. That was their way. "All right," he said, slapping the palms of his hands against his thighs before he slid off of the bed. Piper traced her finger through the dent that he left behind. "Am I allowed to tell you to be careful, at least?"

Piper's face remained solemn for a long moment before she felt the corners of her mouth lift up and into a slow smile. "Yes," she told him. "You are allowed to do that."

"Watch out for yourself, Piper," Victor told her. "You and the boys are all I got left."

That was remarkably close to making them sound as if they had been an actual family for the past thirty years instead of…whatever it was that they were. Piper cleared her throat into her hand and had to turn away for a moment before she was able to meet her father's eyes again. "You have Amelia," she said. "I have a good feeling about that one."

"You haven't even met that one," Victor pointed out.

"Witchy instincts," Piper replied. Off of Victor's look, she protested, "I could have those. You don't know what I could or couldn't have." That family feeling was crawling back into the room, slow and insidious, and right when Piper was in no position to run away, too. She ignored the pain in her stomach so that she could continue fidgeting restlessly in the bed.

Before Victor could reply, there came a clamoring from the hallway, the sound of three people shouting and then a body being thrown up against the wall. Piper did not know Dean so well by this point that she could pinpoint whether he was the one being introduced to the plaster, but she knew the sound of his shout well enough. "Oh, I crap /I ," she exclaimed before flicking her hands in the direction of the hallway.

The sounds of scuffling and shouting ceased as abruptly as if they were a part of a soundtrack that had been switched off without warning, leaving only the sound of one man breathing heavily. "What in the hell?" Dean said.

Piper pushed a few strands of hair back from her eyes and leaned against her pillows. "Dad," she said to her astonished father, "I would like you to meet Dean Winchester, my knight in shining armor."

"Traveling from town to town, righting wrongs and vanquishing evil wherever I found it," Dean said dryly as he walked through the door. "And if the helpless maidens are so overcome that they feel an urge to shower me with kisses afterwards, well, pushing them away would be downright unchivalrous."

"Vanquished?" Victor turned to Piper and asked her.

"Different kind of vanquished," Piper answered absently, watching Dean. "_Helpless_?" she asked.

Dean was peeking around the corner at the frozen guards. He turned back long enough to flash her a grin. "Figure of speech." Dean turned back to examine the guard again, who was still frozen in a grappling pose. He reached out and gave the guy a healthy shove, watching as he rocked back onto his heels and nearly fell, before he turned back to Piper.

"Was that what you did to me?" Dean asked. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the frozen guard. "How do I know that it's not going to give me cancer or something?"

"You would be the first," Piper said, watching Dean closely. The glib, flirtatious words were not matching the man underneath, she reflected, and someone really needed to pull him to the side and tell him that she should not pin too many of his hopes onto a future as an actor. Piper might have been sleeping a heavy, drugged sleep for most of the day, but Dean did not look as if he had slept at all. There were dark circles beneath his eyes and stubble on his cheeks, and the odor of smoke trailed after him as he came deeper into the room.

Dean shrugged his shoulders once within his jacket, as if he was trying to throw off goosebumps, before he threw another glance over his shoulder at the frozen guards. "That's not right," he told Piper flatly before he pushed his hand out for Victor to take. "Dean Winchester."

Victor hesitated for a long, long moment before he finally accepted Dean's hand. His touch was light and wary, and he let go as soon politeness allowed. Piper, for her part, was glad that he didn't try to prove his status as protector by crushing all of the bones in Dean's hand. "The murder suspect," Victor said.

Dean's easy smile froze on his face only for a second. He was good at this game, ordinarily. "I'm going to start putting that on all of my business cards," he said before he moved his gaze over to Piper. "Little legal snafu that I'm still trying to get cleared up."

"Dean, this is my father, Victor." In the midst of hunting a demon that had done its very best to kill her twice in the span of twenty-four hours and wanted to turn Wyatt back to the evil that he didn't even know he was capable of, sitting in a hospital bed and, ridiculously, unable to take her mind off of the fact that her sister's spirit would show herself to a stranger but not to Piper, she still felt like a young woman introducing her father to her boyfriend for the first time. It was all that Piper could do not to clamp her hands over her mouth and give in to a peal of laughter that would probably sound more than a little crazed. She eyed the IV drip warily, wondering if there was not a lot more in the way of painkillers traveling down the length of its tube than she had originally supposed.

Dean cast her a speculative look as he stepped back from Victor. Piper first thought that the strain was showing on her face, until he saw the way that his eyes were moving over and over her body, from her head down to her feet, on an endless loop. Not surprising, Piper thought dryly, as her hair was a rat's nest, she was wearing a shapeless hospital gown, and could feel several swollen, painful blisters on her cheek that probably made her look as if she was halfway through recovering through a truly ugly sunburn. It was as if he became convinced that his eyes were lying to him every time that he started to convince himself that she was real.

"You were supposed to leave before the police showed up," Piper said softly.

Dean grinned at her, lopsided and with all of the cracks showing. "Didn't tell me to stay gone," he said. "We still have work to do."

Yes. They did, and that sentence alone endeared Dean to her more than any amount of honey-thick charm that he could have laid down. Piper straightened in her hospital bed and smoothed her gown down, feeling her face tighten for a moment as the stitches pulled. Both her father and her…her Dean, or her white knight, or whatever the hell he was turning into, watched her very closely. "Dad, I need you to take Chris until all of this is settled. He's not the one that the demon wants, he'll be safer with you."

"Glad to have him," Victor said, "but what about Wyatt?"

Piper glanced out the hospital window, where the sun was a glowing red ball, slowly losing its grip upon the horizon. "It only attacks at night," Dean said without needing to be prompted. It was almost eerie, how much they were beginning to read each others' minds.

Piper nodded. "Wyatt is the one that it wants." She struggled to refer to the demon as 'it', when in her mind it was and always would be Billie, the last person that she and her sisters ever should have decided to trust. "It's going to be drawn to any place where it senses that Wyatt and I are together." That made staying in the hospital more dangerous by the moment. Three was a magical number, a lucky number. It was only whether the third attack would sway in the demon's favor or theirs that remained to be seen. Piper took a deep breath before she said something that went against every single instinct that she had as a mother. "If we're going to set a trap for this thing, then Wyatt and I both have to be the bait. Nothing else will work." She forced her hands to unclench from the fists that she had tightened them into before she cut bloody stigmata into her own palms.

Dean's eyes were dark and troubled. Piper did not know if that was more of the unspoken wavelength that they were sharing or only proof that he was a decent person, for Victor looked every bit as distressed as Dean himself. Dean clenched his teeth together until a muscle in his jaw began to do a spastic dance and nodded jerkily, looking as if he would much rather be kicking the side of the hospital bed instead.

"Dad, will you go tell Chris and Wyatt that I'll be there in a minute?" Piper asked. She started to swing her legs over the side of the bed, winced, and then pulled a face as she made a half-hearted effort to comb some of the worst tangles out of her hair. Bits of ash floated down and into her lap. "I smell like the inside of a fireplace." She mourned for a second as she had to pull the IV and its sweet, disorienting nectar from her hand, but sacrifices had to be made.

Victor leaned down and picked up a shopping bag that had been sitting, unnoticed, by his feet since Piper had woken up. "I went and got you a few things after the doctors said that you were stable," Victor said, "since nothing at your apartment is usable."

Piper accepted the bag from him and peered at the clothing inside. "Thank you," she said, touched.

"You could have called me after the first fire, Piper," Victor said, his voice equal parts worried and reproachful, while Dean looked out the window and pretended that there was no family drama taking place within the room at all.

"I know," Piper said softly. She reached into the bag and pulled out a loose, soft blouse the color of coffee. "Thank you," she said again.

"Somehow I didn't think that you would be staying in the hospital until the doctors decided to release you," Victor said, his mouth twitching for a moment. "I'll go wake up the boys." With a final once-over in Dean's direction, he turned and left the room.

Piper peeked down her gown and discovered that she did not have a stitch of clothing on under it, though she had quite a few elsewhere. She stared in awe at the ugly, mottled bruises that surrounded all of points where the thread was wound through her flesh. Piper glanced up again and was not terribly surprised to see that Dean had not followed her father's lead and exited the room also. "Not a big believer in privacy, are you?"

The corners of Dean's mouth shifted, a half-hearted gesture. No one was ever going to believe his flirting when he was wearing those eyes. "And stand out there with the wax museum that you've set up?" he asked. "Not a chance." The smile fell away as Dean gave up even the pretense of being the skirt-chasing ne'er do well. "I'm not going to leave you alone."

Piper shifted by painful degrees until her legs were dangling, bared to the thigh, over the edge of the bed. Her skin was dotted here and there with bruises ranging from pea green to a shade of blue that was nearly black, and she could feel even more on her back from where the Billie-thing had taken such joy in bouncing her off of the wall. "Turn your back, then," she said as she resumed rummaging through her shopping back. When Dean hesitated, Piper quirked her eyebrow and said, "If you're looking for a free peep show, Dean, I think that you can do better than me right now." She rolled her shoulder, where a particularly unpleasant bruise was stamped right over the bone, for emphasis.

Dean snorted, but made a big show of both turning his back and shutting the hospital door. Piper even thought that she saw a faint blush crawling up the sides of his neck. She felt inexplicably better as she resumed going through the bag. There were so many levels of awkward involved in her father bringing her underwear, Piper reflected, that she just did not have time to go through all of them right now. She hoped that Amelia had done the job of selecting there.

After struggling into the underthings amid many muttered excuses and soft sounds of pain, Piper pulled the blouse over her head and then reached into the bag for socks and jeans. Victor had played it safe and selected clothing that was a size or two too large for her, for which Piper was grateful. She did not want to combine her stitches with the waistband of a pair of jeans that had to be painted on.

Loose or not, Piper felt as if she had been hit by a truck and then, on the way to the hospital to be treated for those injuries, had been hit by another truck. She lost her balance as she was struggling to get one leg into the jeans and fell sideways against the hospital bed, giving her hip a painful whack against the protective railing. With the substantial weight that she had lost since Leo's death, it felt as if the blow echoed off of the bone itself. Piper yelped and then closed her eyes tightly as tears of pain sprang up in them.

A pair of warm hands appeared at her back and her elbow, steadying her. Piper startled so hard that she nearly sent herself tumbling into the side of the bed again. "Dean!" she yelped, swatting his hand away and glaring. She could feel the heat of fresh color rising in her cheeks. "Keeping your back turned is not a complicated set of commands. Either one of the boys could do it." Strong words from a woman who could not put on a pair of pants.

Dean was looking at her face. Very determinedly, she noticed, he was looking only at her face. "Oh, please, if we wait for you to do it yourself, we'll be here all night and you'll wind up with another transfusion." Dean grinned at her as Piper glared. "You might be immune to my charms. Those nurses aren't."

If she was going to start looking differently at every woman who was completely undone by Dean Winchester's green eyes, Piper reflected, she was going to wind up isolating herself from most of the straight female population of the human race. Still. "I can do it," Piper insisted, and punctuated her next attempt by nearly falling over again. She sighed. As therapeutic as making things go boom frequently was, there were many days when she would not have said no to Prue's more refined and controllable abilities.

"You're an inspiration to us all," Dean said dryly. His mask of innocence was as bad as all of his previous attempts, and worse because this time she had the feeling that he was being transparent on purpose. "Piper, let me help. You're not exactly at your strip-teasing best right now, if that's what you're so worried about."

Piper wrinkled her nose. "I'm going to take that as a compliment," she said, and wondered if it was the checkered pattern of bruises marking up her legs and back that was apparently making her such a repulsive female specimen, or if Dean had snuck a peek at the stitches while she was not looking. Immediately afterwards, she caught herself and wondered why she wondered.

"Fine," Piper allowed grudgingly. "Consider me sweet-talked."

"You had to fall sometime," Dean said. "They always do." The flirtation in his voice did not match the worry in and around his eyes. He was going to give himself lines before he was thirty-five if he kept assigning himself to be the protector of everything and everyone. Piper would know.

She braced one of her hands on Dean's shoulders and hopped awkwardly while he helped her into the jeans, able to feel the play of muscle even through his jacket and shirt. It was time for more morphine; she had taken the needle out too quickly. Then Dean's hands were warm and gentle on her hips, callused from holding weapons for so long. They rasped at her in a way that did not hurt, that actually felt very good.

'Not even eight months yet.' It was not time for more morphine, Piper decided as she abruptly swatted Dean's hands away and finished buttoning up the jeans herself. Dean pulled back and stared at her with a puzzled expression. She had already had too much as it was, if it was going to keep doing funny things to her like apparently sucking her brain out through her nose.

"Okay, thanks, got it!" Piper exclaimed with a brightness that bordered on panic as she sat quickly back down on the bed. Feeling as if she was fully awake again after months had its disadvantages, such as noticing the deeply male scent of Dean that lingered beneath the smoke, a scent that she had not realized how much she missed until it was there again. She reached into the bag and pulled out the final item, a pair of socks.

"You sure?" Dean's tone indicated that eh fully expected her to tumble off of the bed and down to the floor at any moment.

"Yep. I am modern, independent woman, I bring home the bacon, I fry it up in a pan, and I put on my own socks." Phoebe had once babbled like this whenever she was caught and knew it. Piper was the worst person in the world, she was sure, for being unable to throw the smell of the man from her nose and the feel of his hands from her skin.

"So all witches do magic and have a screw loose," Dean said, half to himself. "Dad, you could have saved me a lot of trouble by mentioning that second part." A note sadness caught his voice for a moment, as if he had a burr in his throat. Piper was pretty sure that she had not been meant to hear that part.

She watched him for a beat too long before she shook herself and looked down at the socks again. "We all do magic," she corrected. "You're taking your chances on the crazy part." Even if the odds were probably in Dean's favor.

Getting the socks unrolled was no problem. It was the bending over to reach her feet and feeling as if she had just received a switchblade to her gut that was presenting something of a technical difficulty. Piper gasped so that she would not swear or let out the kind of screech that would draw all of the nurses in the building down upon them in an angry, syringe-wielding horde. If she was very, very lucky, the bead of wetness that she could feel rolling down her belly was sweat and not blood from a freshly pulled stitch. Piper rolled up the hem of her shirt so that she could look, noting with relief that luck was on her side for once. She winced as she realized that her new scar was going to be just an inch above the one from her C-section. Not on her strip-teasing best. Right.

She was still the worst person in the world.

"Oh, for God's sake. Here." Dean took the socks from her hands before she could protest and knelt in front of her. He eyed the stitches in her stomach before she could lower the hem of the blouse back down. "Sam did worse that than to himself on his skateboard, never mind fighting demons. And he wasn't half as much of a baby about it, either." He was a liar, but he was a sweet one. Piper wondered how many women had fallen on those two facts alone.

"I'm fine," Piper said, pulling a face. She reached for the socks again, only to have Dean hold them out of her reach as if the two of them were the world's largest pair of seven year-olds.

"So you've said," Dean replied. "And you made such a _hearty_ squeaking sound to prove it. What makes you think that this is about you, anyway? Maybe I just have a foot fetish and you have cute ones."

Piper smiled in spite of herself. "Pervert," she said. She watched as Dean helped her with first her socks and then her shoes, brushing aside her protests with, "I have a shoe fetish, too. All kinds of kinks working here."

"Who's Sam?" Piper asked suddenly, staring down at the crown of Dean's bowed head. His shoulders hunched up towards his ears, a defensive gesture that made him look more like a young boy than a man just a notch or two beneath thirty. Piper knew that she still had some time to take the question back, and there was a part of her that supposed she ought to try. Only, Dean already knew why she was in this fight. It seemed fair that she should know why he was in it in return.

Piper had a bitchy streak. This was no surprise to her, but she thought sometimes that Prue would be proud of her if she had seen how well her younger sister had learned how to use it.

Dean straightened and met her eyes. Piper realized that she had been wrong when she had decided that Dean could not act. His eyes were still as sharp and green and beautiful as stained glass, but there was no one behind them. "My brother," Dean said shortly. He held out his arm to help Piper down from the bed.

"I can walk," Piper pointed out, feeling slightly guilty even though she could not say why.

The quirk of Dean's mouth as he glanced back at her was more like a spastic twitch than a real smile, but he was seated behind his own eyes again. Piper was glad of that, at least.   
"About as well as you could handle the shoes?" he asked her.

Piper had to take a few steps, then, to spite him if for nothing else. She then took a few steps more, until the room stopped pitching back and forth as if someone had taken her hospital room and suspended it on a stormy sea. Now it felt more as if it was on a lake where there was a good, stiff breeze blowing, but that was an improvement. That much Piper could still handle, though she thought that the two pints of blood that had been poured into her had obviously been done on the assumption that she was going to lie on her back for the next few days until she managed to build up the rest on her own again. Piper snorted softly to herself and wondered how the hospital would feel about putting in an option for beefed-up super transfusions, for those people who just could not wait for piddly little things like having a doctor's clearance or being able to stand on their own.

Piper put her hand against her stomach and grit her teeth, focusing very hard on putting one foot in front of the other rather than returning to the bed and the IV that she had so foolishly pulled out. The guards at the door were just beginning to twitch as her distractedly-cast freeze wore off. Piper flicked her hands out quickly to freeze them again, harder this time, and ignored Dean's mutterings about tumors and epilepsy behind her. Hissing between her teeth and mumbling a few choice words of her own, Piper braced her hand against one of the officer's shoulders and leaned up so that she could murmur a few _other_ choice words to him, this time with a far different end in mind. She repeated the process with a second officer and them turned to see Dean watching her with a quizzical expression.

"A little present for you, a little memory alteration for them," Piper explained as she took the officers' limbs and began pulling them back down from the positions that they had been in when she had frozen them, when they had still been grappling with Dean. 'If it actually works,' Piper could not help thinking, but she still felt more alert and alive than she had in a long time and thought that the chances were good. "If I'm going to go AWOL for a while, then it's probably better for you if you're not connected with my disappearance."

"Handy skill to have," Dean said as he helped Piper move the officers into positions that would panic them less whenever the freeze wore off. He paused and gave the arm of one of them, the burlier of the pair and the one who had thrown Dean against the wall, a long, speculative look.

"Don't put his finger up his nose or anything," Piper said, finishing and then standing back so that she could view her work. She and Dean had leaned the officers back against the wall, their arms folded over their chests, in postures that would let them think that they had done nothing more than doze off whenever they woke. She put her hand against her stitches, which felt as if they were on the verge of crawling right out of their skin, struggling to keep her face neutral. She thought that she was going to tangle with a demon powerful enough to shrug off all of her magic like a cheap parlor trick? How?

With force of will, Piper told herself. Force of will, pure mother-love, and the Power of Three. She would _not_ be ignored.

Dean looked briefly wounded as he released the officer's arm so that he could step back to view the scene, his posture a near-perfect mirror of Piper's own. "What makes you think that I'm going to do that?" he asked her.

"Because my sister Paige used to do the same thing," Piper said as she turned towards the direction of the waiting room. 'And I can say her name without flinching,' she thought in Dean's direction.

They had only gone a few dozen yards before Piper saw a cluster of security guards that looked suspicious to her, said 'screw it', and flapped out her hands to freeze everything within her sight. With luck, she would wind up freezing the entire hospital.

"Think that maybe that's a little bit of overkill there, cupcake?" Dean asked her. He looked around at all of the frozen figures, swatted at a nurse's ponytail to send it swinging, and muttered, "It's beginning to turn into goddamned Ripley's in here."

"Language," Piper said before she remembered that there were no little pitchers around to hear them. She felt a faint flush crawling up her cheeks. "Anyway, an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure, and we don't have time to go back and correct mistakes." And because she needed to exert her powers over something, if for no reason than to burn off some of this excess energy before she had a meltdown, and she did not think that the hospital administration would appreciate it if she began to explode the gurneys.

"Is that part of an actual spell?" Dean asked. The way his voice sounded, a stranger would think that Piper was practicing magic of the Macbeth variety, maggots and all, rather than something more akin to twinkling her nose.

Piper ignored Dean's tone, saying instead, "Hang on," as she spotted a nurse's station. She walked around the counter and gingerly wheeled the frozen nurse, her hands still poised in midair, back from her computer screen. She typed in a few commands to get the result that she wanted before she looked up at Dean and said simply, "I have to check on Henry before we go."

Dean could have argued with her, could have thrown back her own words about not having time to make mistakes, but instead said only, "Okay."

Upon entering Henry's room, Piper discovered that it was as frozen as all of the rest of the hospital, and the lack of beeping and whirring noises from the monitors caused an immediate ridge of gooseflesh to run down her spine. She took a moment to steel herself in the doorway before she stepped forward cautiously into the wax museum that she had created. Dean remained behind her in the doorway, either to give her privacy or to escape the worst of the world's oppressive creepiness and watch the exit at the same time. Perhaps both.

Both of the room's chairs had been pulled up to Henry's bedside, and both of them were occupied by distraught older people that Piper did not know. She thought that they might be Paige's in-laws, thought she doubted that Paige had had a chance to meet them, either. The weeks leading up to her and Henry's impromptu marriage and the explosion at the manor had been a flurry of preparations for war. Piper dimly remembered Paige telling her once that Henry made such a devote parole officer because he had been a cog in the foster care machine when he was a child, and as such was determined to see that his mostly very young charges were not abandoned in the same way. If so, he must have found his way into a pair of good hands eventually.

Piper let her hand hover over the woman's shoulder for nearly a full minute before she closed it into a fist again, unable to bring herself to touch them even enough to pull them back and give herself more room. She slipped between the chairs instead. Henry was dressed in a hospital gown like the one that Piper had found herself in when she had woken up, but heavy bandages still protruded from his collar, wound up his neck, and hid the burn from view. Piper wanted in a perverse way to see it, this scarring brand that Henry had taken in order to protect her and her sons even though he had not needed to do it. She ghosted her fingers very lightly over the bandage instead before she took a seat on the bed and stared very hard at Henry's blistered face and cracked lips.

The eerie, perfect silence was about to send Piper running straight from the room, so she unfroze Henry and the machines that he was hooked up to, telling herself that as soon as the beeping changed she would go sprinting for the very first doctor that she could unfreeze, and exposure be damned. With the calm, steady beeping of the heart monitor in the background, Piper was able to collect her thoughts. If there was any part of Henry that was aware of her presence beneath the heavy drugs that he was on, she wanted him to hear what she had to say.

"I guess we'll start with thank you," Piper began, taking Henry's unresponsive hand in her own and staring down at it as she ran her thumb lightly across the knuckles. "For defending me and my boys tonight, for opening up your home to us, for…" Piper trailed off for a moment as she remembered all of the times over the past several months that Henry had agreed to watch the boys at the drop of a hat, a few times so that Piper could deal with magical threats that wanted to fill the power vacuum that existed in the absence of the Charmed Ones. More often, though, Piper had called him over because she had thought that if she not get a chance to be alone and to tend to the thoughts brooding in her head she was going to lose her mind altogether. "For keeping me sane, and for being my family, even thought I was doing everything that I could to ignore what I had left." That, and her magic. The willful ignoring of both was going to stop tonight.

Piper snuck a glance over her shoulder at the people who cared enough about Henry to rush to the hospital upon hearing that he was hurt. "It looks like you have a pretty good family of your own right here," she said. "But you're part of mine now, too, and we're notorious for not letting people go easily." Piper would never be sure, but she thought that she felt Henry's hand tightening around her own very slightly before she let him go and stood up from the bed. She refroze Henry and all of the equipment that was keeping him stable before she turned back to Dean.

The room was quiet enough so that he must have heard at least some of what she had said. "You ready?" Dean asked her, doing the courtesy of pretending that he had not.

"Yes," Piper said, and meant that she was ready to get on with a lot more than leaving a hospital room.

Everything in the waiting room was frozen except for Victor and the boys, as Piper had intended, including a tall, elegant woman with champagne blonde hair that was riddled with streaks of gray. This must be Amelia. She paused in order to give the new woman in her father's life a long, appraising stare until both of the boys noticed that she was there.

Chris gave a joyous shout and ran forward immediately, hurling himself against her with such force that he nearly bowled her over and then clinging to her no less forcefully than a barnacle did to the side of a ship. Wyatt took more time. He paused for a long moment so that he could regard her solemnly over the picture that he had been drawing before he got up and gave her a very careful hug. He was old enough now so that he could reach her waist rather than resorting to hugging her around her thigh, as his brother was doing, and even his most gentle embrace still hurt. Piper would die before she would ever let it show. She put her hands onto both of their heads ruffled their hair. Her boys. Her babies.

Without saying a word, Wyatt put his hand against her stomach, where it began to glow very faintly. "Oh," Piper said a moment later, feeling something in her stomach that was more like a nasty cat scratch than the deep gash that she had been sporting a moment before, and tightness from the remaining stitches. It wasn't complete healing. It was still much more than she had known Wyatt to be capable of yet before, and it brought to mind all of the different uses that the thing inside of Billie could find for him. "Thank you, sweetheart."

Victor stared at Amelia, who was caught in the middle of taking a sip of her coffee, and poked at her in the same way that Dean had done to the guards. He glanced up at Piper. "Your work?"

Piper nodded and continued to look Amelia over, memorizing the details. "She seems nice," she said finally. Amelia seemed very different from Piper's mother, was what she meant, but there were so many different ways for that to be interpreted wrongly. Piper was still pretty sure that she meant some of them.

"She is," Victor said, reaching out to take Amelia's free hand even though he must know that she could not feel the gesture. Piper wondered if he felt as if he was bringing home a new girlfriend home to meet the parents, and if the role reversal was giving him as many heebie-jeebies as it was her.

"Are you guys close enough that I should…?" Piper made a vague gesture that managed to convey that she meant unfreezing Amelia at the same time that she refrained from actually doing it.

"No," Victor said quickly before he realized that the answer might have come too fast and began to backtrack. "I don't think that she's ready to be that much a part of our family yet." Yet.

"Okay." Since Piper was worried about kneeling down onto Chris's level might do to her still-tender stomach, she instead took him by the chin and tilted his face up until his eyes could meet hers. "Sweetie, I'm going to turn you over to Grandpa for a little while, all right? Mommy and Wyatt and Dean have to go take care of some things, but we'll be back." Piper saw Wyatt out of the corner of her eye, also tilting his face up so that he could watch her, but, as was so often the case these days, he was choosing to keep his own counsel.

Chris had no such desire to be stoic. "No!" he cried as soon as Piper's words had a chance to sink in, clinging that much harder to her leg and turning his face into her thigh. Though his voice was muffled, Piper could still make out, "Go with you."

"I know you want to, Chris," Piper said, running her fingers through Chris's fine, dark hair. Both of the boys were wearing different clothes than they had been when Piper had seen them last and smelled of soap rather than smoke. Victor must have taken them by his apartment and given each one of them a bath when he had gone to get Piper clothes. "But there's a very bad thing inside of Billie that wants to hurt you, do you understand And Mommy and Dean are the only ones who can stop it before it hurts anyone else, but we need Wyatt to help us do that." For a lie-or near enough-that made her feel so awful inside, Piper found that her voice did not shake at all as she told it.

Chris pulled his face away from Piper's leg long enough to give his brother an awestruck and faintly worshipful look. Wyatt continued watching Piper's face for a moment longer, though surely he felt Chris's eyes on him, before he released her so that he could go to Chris and envelope him in a broad hug. Piper thought that he might even have whispered something to his brother; she could not be sure. Dean, she noticed, was watching the both of them very hard, though he turned away when he noticed her attention.

After a few moments of silent conference, Wyatt took Chris by the hand and led him over to Victor. Though Chris's eyes and cheeks were wet with tears, he did not fuss or protest any further. Piper privately thought that she would have preferred it if Wyatt had fussed just a bit more. Most kids his age and much older would have gone into hysterics after what he had gone through, and not come out of them again for hours. Piper thought of the moment when she had realized that the demon wanted Wyatt and not Chris, for whom goodness came so naturally and effortlessly if his future self was anything to go by, not Wyatt that she had had to fight so hard to conceive and then fight so hard to save. Her flash of rage was immediate, brilliant, and blinding. Had Billie been standing in front of her, Piper would have blasted her so hard that there would have been nothing left but her shoes.

She forced her anger down to a place where it could not harm her now but could still be put to use later and said to her father, "I'm going to release all of this," she waved her hand around to indicate the stasis that she had put the hospital in, "as soon as we're out of sight. If I don't call you by dawn and let you know how everything went, then assume the worst, take Chris, and get as far away from San Francisco as you can."

Victor looked pained, but said only, "Be careful, Piper."

"I will," Piper replied, only to find herself pulled into a hug before she could even think to pull away. Victor hugged her as hard as she could stand, both physically and emotionally, until Piper awkwardly hugged him back and pulled away. She wondered if the hug had been as odd fro him as it had for her. "Thanks for looking after them," Piper offered lamely before she took Wyatt by the hand and led him away.

"Don't," Piper said as soon as they had left the waiting room behind them for the hallway, because she could feel Dean's eyes on the side of her face. She glanced over, sighed, and said, "It's very complicated, okay? Too complicated to go into without several hours and a few visual aids."

"I know from complicated," Dean said, but then used it as an invitation for Piper to keep her silence rather than as an excuse to push her into opening up. She was grateful for that.

"Wait," Piper said suddenly, stopping by a frozen doctor and rummaging through the pockets of his coat until she came up with a prescription pad and a pen. She turned back around and faced Dean's raised eyebrows.

"If you want to raid the pharmacy, I'm pretty sure that it's that way," Dean said, pointing. "No need to go all stealth about it." His eyes flicked from the blisters that she could still feel on her cheeks to her stomach, a none too subtle way of telling her that she looked as bad as she felt.

"This isn't for drugs," Piper said as she clenched the pad and the pen in one hand and reclaimed Wyatt with the other. "One way or another, I'm going to make my sisters talk to me."

End Part Nine


	10. Chapter 10

Part Ten

According to Piper, the Halliwell family as a general rule had very little experience when it came to the fine art of breaking and entering. Dean just thought that that was a waste of a perfectly good well of talent. He said as much as he brought the Mustang to a halt on a darkened street in a strange, cramped neighborhood that he had never seen before, even though he had been to San Francisco three other times on jobs. There were a few apartments, mostly two and three family jobs that looked as if they might have been stores themselves before the owners had given in and decided to find a more reliable way of making their money, but the majority of the spaces were taken up by occult shops ranging from those that mainly offered weekend hobbies to bored yuppies to those that Dean could tell at a glance were the real deal.

Piper snorted when Dean suggested that she give up the life of a stable, dependable club owner and instead turn to one of magic-enhanced cat burglary. "Thanks, but my boys don't really need any encouragement to indulge in criminal enterprises." She glanced at Wyatt through the rearview mirror as she spoke, a look that Dean could not translate and did not think that he was meant to see.

Dean grinned in spite of himself and cut the Mustang's lights. There was a dog barking several blocks away as he stepped out of the car, but that was the only sound. In the absence of all others, Dean felt his skin begin to prickle. No noise at all was frequently every bit as dangerous as the wrong noises. He looked up and down the street and saw a few electric lights glowing in the buildings that had been converted into apartments, but beyond that all was quiet. The shops that carried the kinds of wares that he and Piper were going to need, at least the legitimate ones, understood the wisdom of closing up with the sinking sun. Dean had always thought that this was because quite a few of the proprietors were using the shadows to bump as fiercely in the night as they could before Dean would show up to bump back, but as long as they carried what Piper needed he would behave himself. Even if the mere thought of magic was making him every bit as cranky as it always did.

He would not have needed to use magic if he had been able to hit the broad side of a barn in the first place, a voice inside of his head whispered. Dean scowled, and it shut up quickly. "Come on," he said, more brusquely than he intended.

"This is wrong," Piper said as she got Wyatt out of the backseat of the car and followed Dean. She kept Wyatt's hand clasped firmly in her own, as she had been doing every available second since they had been reunited. The only time that she had released him was so that she could set him in the backseat while she sat in the front, and even that had been with an audible moue of distress.

"You got any money on you?" Dean turned and asked her. Piper shook her head. "Then it's either this, or wait until morning and hope that we don't burn down the Holiday Inn." His tone was still much harsher than he intended and at the same time much less harsh than it wanted to be, than it would have to be in order to convey how pissed off he still was at himself.

Rather than flaring up, Piper merely cocked an eyebrow at him and said, "You're doing it again," in a no-nonsense tone of voice.

Dean sighed. "Doing what?" he asked, looking up and down the street for a shop that was large enough to contain everything that Piper said she needed. The more that they broke into, the greater the chances that someone out for a nighttime stroll, a barking dog, or some other unforeseen variable would trip them up.

Dean would really hate to have to tell people that he had been arrested because of someone's yapping mutt.

"That thing," Piper said, pointing at his face with her free hand, as if that was supposed to somehow make all of the pieces come together within his mind. He frowned. "You've been giving me that look ever since we left the hospital, whenever you think that I'm not looking. It's not your fault that I got hurt."

"That gun could have ended all of this, right then and there, if I could have shot in a straight line," Dean growled, not willing to accept the forgiveness in her eyes even less than he was the pity. He had been the one so stuck on keeping the family together at the expense of revenge, if that's what it came down to, and now the family was gone and revenge was all that he had left. It had been Sam's legacy for a year and Dad's for over twenty years before that; now Dean supposed that it was his, too. It would have been a lot easier to make his peace with that if Piper were not so personable and with such a low tolerance for crap, if she did not have such large brown eyes, and if her boys did not remind him so powerfully of he and Sam when they were small and just starting to realize that the world had teeth.

"Damn that demon and its pesky ability to bend reality," Piper snapped, sounding as if there was a great deal more irritation locked up and just waiting for Dean to push the right combination of buttons that would set it loose. When Dean flashed her a look, she added, "Yes, I saw. Besides, if I wouldn't have been hurt if you had been able to stop that bullet from disobeying the laws of physics, then I also would not have been hurt if I had been keeping up with my magic for the past year. There are crystals that can repel demons much better than salt and blessed oil, even if they are a much bigger pain in the-" She glanced down at Wyatt briefly before she continued, "Butt. I would not have been hurt if my sisters and I had been smart enough not to trust Billie in the first place, since this thing was so scared to mess with the Power of Three, and I would not have been hurt if I had given up my powers when I had the chance a few years ago. Then my kids would have been born normal-" Piper cut herself off, frowned for a moment, and then went on, "Well, they would have been normalish. But the demon would not have been interested in them. It would have set the neighbor's house on fire, so that someone else who wasn't as prepared to deal with this thing as you or I could die." Piper quirked her eyebrow at him again. "Do you see where I'm going with this?"

He did, but that did not mean that he was willing to hear it. "It's more complicated than that," he said.

"It usually is," Piper said, and sighed. "Look, I wasn't ready when that thing attacked, not like I should have been. For all that I know, without your help I would have died. So we can play the self-recrimination and what-if game until the sun comes up, or we can get on with it."

"Will this place have everything that you need?" Dean asked rather than answering Piper directly, pausing them in front of a store that managed to strike a balance between the obvious frauds and the dark, cramped shops that very well might have dragons chewing on virgin bones in the back rooms. Dean made a note of all of those so that he could come back and check them out more fully later. He had a lot of things that he needed to burn off.

Piper looked disappointed at the brush-off, but she tilted her head back so that she could read the store's sign in the moonlight all the same. There were very few streetlights in this neighborhood. Dean was sure that this was by design.

"Yes," Piper finally said reluctantly. "I used to buy a lot of my potions ingredients here." She cast Dean a reproachful look, but still raised her hands into the flicking gesture that Dean now recognized as a sign that she as about to either freeze something or unleash another one of those bursts of wild energy. Piper turned them towards the store windows, her mouth set in an unhappy line. For all of her protests about law and the impromptu civics lesson that she had tried to give him on the way over, which he had roundly ignored, she still knew how to get things done when it came down to crunch time. Take away the cute kids and the pretty brown eyes, and there was still a woman in there after his own heart.

Dean stared at the store dubiously, which looked no different to him than it had before Piper had unleashed her whatever on it. "That freeze-frame of yours work on magical alarm systems, too?" he asked, putting his hand on the door and giving it an experimental rattle. That was an obstacle that he had learned to sidestep by the time that he was fourteen.

Piper gave him another reproachful look. "The owner of this store is a sweet old man," she said.

"Some of those eat children," Dean said, and snuck a look towards some of the more suspicious stores that had caught his eye again. He could almost see the smoke rising from the rooftops. Piper put her hands quickly over Wyatt's ears and gave him a warning look, as if Wyatt was not holding up under everything that he had been through far better than many adults would have in the same situation. Dean flashed Wyatt a grin and then fished a small fold of leather, a wallet to the untrained eye, from his jacket. He had the appropriate pick in the door and the door itself swinging open in under thirty seconds. If any curious eyes came along, Dean figured that Piper could easily freeze them. Give him a little more time and he might even wind up liking the whole magic thing, after all.

Behind him, Dean could hear Piper telling Wyatt in a solemn tone, "Wyatt, I don't want you to be anything like Dean when you grow up."

Dean turned around and gave them both his very best grin. "Little man," he told Wyatt grandly, "you should only wish that you were more like me." Wyatt flashed Dean a very small smile, the first that he had worn in hours, and Piper made a huffing noise. Her irritation drained away, however, when she saw her son's face.

"Thanks," she whispered into Dean's ear reluctantly as she walked past him and into the shop.

"Power of my charm," Dean said, following her. "Everyone falls eventually."

"Ha-" Piper began, only to cut herself off with an abrupt clacking sound as her teeth came together. She hurled both herself and Wyatt backwards, taking the time to throw Wyatt headlong into Dean's arms first. Dean closed his arms around the child instinctively to keep him from falling as a long, dark shadow fell, hissing, from the ceiling.

'The goddamned dragons,' Dean thought, ludicrously, as he leapt both himself and the boy out of harm's way. 'I picked the wrong fucking store.' He held Wyatt against his chest with one arm and reached out with his other hand to grab for Piper, who was still way too close to the reaching, grasping shadow. As it hissed again, there was a flash of white that he realized now were fangs. Dean closed his fingers around Piper's wrist and tumbled her back against him as she flicked her hands out in the gesture that Dean now knew so well. Nothing happened; the shadow continued to whip itself around in a frenzy.

See, now that was why Dean did not like to rely on things that he could not see. You never knew when that battery was going to die on you.

They all ducked as the shadow lashed out over their heads, so that it struck the wooden doorframe rather than Wyatt's face. Dean glanced back at the door and saw two neat holes driven into the wood and oozing a yellow-white substance that reminded Dean of a pixie bite that he had gotten when he was little that had subsequently turned infected. The pus-like substance caused the veneer painted over the wood to smoke and bubble wherever it made contact.

They did not have time to figure out why Piper's magic was picking now of all times to stop working on her. Dean glanced around quickly and saw a silver athame sitting in a glittering window display, surrounded by chalices and bowls. Those Dean knocked quickly out of the way as he reached for the knife.

"Please don't let a genie out or something," Dean muttered as he swung wildly at the shadow the next time that it drew near. Rather than a wisp of fog and smoke, however, he felt the athame go up to the hilt into flesh that wriggled and fought and screamed. He pulled the blade free with a meaty sucking sound, drew his arm back, and stabbed again. Blood, black as ink and so congealed that it was hardly even liquid, sprayed out in a wide arc that obliged them all to duck their heads again. When Dean looked up, the black blood was dripping down the walls, the remains of the door, and even the ceiling, while the shadow had resolved itself into the biggest snake that Dean had ever seen. It hung motionless, its neck slit open in a wide second mouth directly below its head, and swayed too and fro slightly in the night breeze that came in through the door. As the three of them watched, the animal decomposed rapidly and then fell to the floor in noxious-smelling clumps that ate away at the floor.

"They never have attack kittens," Dean muttered as he stared down at the mess on the floor. "Puppies, even. Something with teeth smaller than my freaking finger." He glanced back once at the deep fang marks that had been left behind on the wooden doorframe and wondered what that venom would have done if it had entered human flesh, not noticing as he did so that he had tightened his arms around Wyatt even further.

"Maybe he's not quite as nice an old man as I thought," Piper admitted as she disentangled herself from Dean's embrace. She had one of her arms pressed tightly across her stomach, Dean noticed, and he saw a hint of fresh blood against the creamy flesh of her forearm when she moved.

"What's wrong?" he asked her, instantly becoming alert again.

Piper shook her head and pulled the hem of her blouse up so that she could peek at her stomach, where there was more blood. She swiped at a few of the welling drops before she released a sigh of something that sounded a great deal like relief and let her shirt fall back down again. "The stitches are still there," she said, "and they're pulling a little bit." Piper smiled at Wyatt as Dean set him back down again, for his small face was tight with worry. "Everything's fine, sweetie," she said. "Mommy just has a scratch or two left."

Wyatt stared up at her without a change in expression for several lengthy seconds before he finally said, in a small voice, "Promise?" Dean was beginning to think that the Wyatt that he had seen earlier was the kid experiencing a rare bout of downright chattiness.

Piper's face twitched, caught between a smile and a stricken expression. It might be time that she began to listen to her own lectures, Dean thought, as Piper whispered, "Promise."

Dean glanced down at the knife in his hand and saw that the blade, once gleaming with the sheen of fresh blood, was now rapidly drinking it up and becoming a matte black color. He made a disgusted noise and threw it to the side before it could twist around and bite at his fingers. "Are you sure you're all right?" he asked Piper. Even in the darkness of the store, he could see that her face was white and drawn with care. "Your mojo doesn't seem to be working out for you so well tonight."

Piper opened her mouth, began to speak, and then shook her head and changed direction. "No," she said, and flashed Dean a wan smile before she threw a black look around the store. "He could have told me that he was going to put a spell up like that," she muttered before she reached out and grabbed one of the small plastic baskets that could be slung over the shopper's arm, her movements short and angry. All hints of guilt over what they were doing were gone from her, and Dean nearly doubled over with laughter right then and there. Of course the old man who had a giant magical snake guarding his threshold would also set out baskets for his customers' convenience. That made perfect sense. "I'll be hitting up the Tylenol pretty hard as soon as we're done, but I'll get through." She reached out so that she could touch Wyatt, who was hovering so closely on her heels that it was a wonder he wasn't stepping on her shoes, and ruffled his hair. "I have to, don't I? I made a promise."

Piper roamed the shelves, first finding three crystals, each the size of her first and ranging from pink to a deep, bloody red depending on how the light struck them, and stacking them into her basket. She pulled the prescription pad that she had been scribbling fiercely on over the duration of their car ride and flipped ahead several pages, read what she had written there, and then grabbed a cluster of herbs that released a sharp, musty smell when the stalks were crushed. Dean watched the shop warily while Piper collected her supplies, waiting for another one of the sweet old man's pets to come dropping down from the ceiling. He blamed this distraction for the way that he was completely blindsided when Piper asked for a low, soft voice that was meant to be gentle, "Why are you hunting this demon, Dean?"

He spun and stared at her. Dean was sure that his expression was forbidding, but Piper did not flinch backwards. There was probably a long list of others who had been stared down with nothing more than the power of those steady, compassionate eyes. "I'm not trying to pry," Piper said quietly. She reached into the basket and twisted nervously at a sprig of her herbs before she realized what she was doing and stopped. "Magic is delicate. It picks up on the emotions of everyone in the area. If you're upset, then everything could go wrong, and we can't afford for anything else to go wrong." Her mouth twitched again, one of those smiles that really wasn't. "I'm not sure that I can pull this off as it is." Piper went back to shoving things back into her basket at random, some herbs that Dean recognized and some that he didn't-and he hoped that the mullein root was only going in there because she was searching for an excuse not to look at him, or otherwise they were going to have a talk-as if the conversation was over because she said that it was. Only the set of her shoulders betrayed her.

Dean clenched his teeth together and felt a muscle in his jaw begin to jump. Two possible responses warred against each other: 'And you think there's any way that I'm going to become _less_ upset?' and 'Pick a better lie, Piper.' She could not even look him in the eye. Dean exhaled slowly until he felt his first moment of _real_ anger with Piper, not irritation or even fond exasperation at her complete unwillingness to just let him rescue her and do his job, reach its crest and begin to ebb away. He glanced towards Wyatt, who was still clinging close to his mother and watching every move that Dean made.

"Killed my mother," Dean said. He clipped off each word and spit it out as he would the bullet that he wished he still had. "Killed my father. Killed my brother. Just took it a couple of decades to get the whole set."

Piper stopped putting together her witch's brew so that she could stare at Dean for a long moment, her mouth falling open in horror. "I'm so sorry," she said, and that was not a lie. Her eyes said so.

Dean turned away and threw off an urge to raise his shoulders into nonchalant shrug that no one would believe, least of all himself. "Focus on how we're going to finish it," he said. "Not on how either one of us got here." It came dangerously close to a platitude, and didn't think that anyone believed that, either.

Piper looked at him for a few seconds longer than she needed to before she ducked her head and reviewed everything that she had placed into her basket. "I think that I have everything," she said, her voice lower and quieter than it had been while she was snapping commands at everyone back at the hospital. Maybe she was beginning to regret that she had asked; Dean was certainly beginning to regret that he had answered. "We can leave."

The dead snake, or shadow, or whatever it was that the old man had conjured up instead of just getting a mean, ugly dog like most people would have done was slowly eating a pit into the floor as they walked to the door. Dean stepped around it carefully.

"I need to make a note of all of this," Piper said half to herself, staring down into her basket as all three of them stepped back into the cool night air. Her lips moved silently as she counted. "So that I can pay for it later." She cast a wry glance over her shoulder at what was left of the snake. "And that. There are pesky rules against fixing it myself, even if I could. My life would be a lot easier if no one had ever come up with the no personal gain clause."

"Paying for it?" Dean gaped at her. "The man just tried to kill you."

"He didn't try to kill me specifically," Piper said, then rolled her eyes as if she was realizing how ridiculous she sounded. "It was an alarm system." When that came out even worse, she huffed and added, "He gives the boys candy, okay? And sometimes he would give it to Leo, too, which was pretty funny." Her voice for a moment did not know if it wanted to be fond or sad.

Dean tried to imagine the man that Piper had married, this Leo, and found that he could not. He glanced towards Wyatt as he struggled to see what those features would look like in about thirty years and instead discovered that he could only see Piper: the faint touches of her around his eyes, the way that his nose turned up slightly, the defiance that he had already shown. He and Piper both were made for standing their ground, swaying like prizefighters but refusing to drop.

After a moment, Piper's hand found Dean's arm, warmth that radiated even through the leather of his jacket. She squeezed lightly, once. Even though Dean knew that the gesture was probably based largely out of pity, he decided to let her hand stay.

End Part Ten


	11. Chapter 11

Part Eleven

Dean was angry, that much was obvious. Piper did not know if he was angry at her, angry at the demon, or angry at the entire universe in general. She was willing to lay money down that it was a mixture of all three, and it wasn't as if he didn't have good cause, but she was still troubled. Unpredictable emotions made for unpredictable spells, that was one lesson that she and her sister had been forced to learn over and over again through the years. Piper touched at her stomach and was able to feel the thick black thread that she had not had had the time to pull out yet even through the cotton. And they weren't going to get another chance if the spell went wrong; they had already been given so many narrow escapes as it was that Piper almost believed that there really was something out there looking out for them.

Then again, she thought, staring down at the hands that she had clenched against one another in her lap. She forced one of them to uncurl and saw that her fingers were trembling. Dean was not the only one who might have some trouble keeping his emotions in check. Piper glanced once into the rearview mirror and saw that her son was staring back at her. She was beginning to wonder if he did not have some latent psychic ability from Phoebe, the way that he kept doing that. If so, she hoped that he knew that she was going to take Billie apart limb by limb, if that was what it took to prevent Billie from laying hand on him again. She hoped he knew how much she hated that she was having to put him into danger again in order to save him.

"Do you know what to do?" Dean asked her as he brought the car to a halt at the curb, shut off the engine, and then shoved the keys into the pocket of the jacket. As Piper had been the one to come up with more of the plan, she could hardly be expected to forget it, but she had a mind that Dean was asking far more to settle his nerves than he was for any other reason. He had said little on the way back to the manor site, but that muscle in his jaw had to be exhausted right now from its incessant jumping, and Piper could hear his knuckles creaking around the steering wheel from where she sat.

She turned and looked out the car window, towards the charred foundation that was all that was left of the manor, so that she would not have to answer immediately. Piper strained her eyes, but even with the streetlights she could not see what she desperately wanted to see. There were no shadowy outlines among the gloom, glimpsed from the corner of her eye and darting swiftly away whenever she turned her head. It was just an empty lot, the site of a tragedy that had taken place a year before, and owned by a half-crazy widow who kept reaching for parts of the past that were not there any longer.

"Yes," Piper said finally when she felt Dean's gaze resting hot and heavy against the side of her neck. She reached for the basket that had been sitting on the floor between her feet for the past half-hour, drawing it up and into her lap. Piper thought that she felt a spark when she ran her fingers lightly across the rose quartz and red carnelian, but she could not be sure. Simulated Power of Three, should the real thing fail to come through for her.

Piper hated to admit it, but she thought that the chances that her sisters would leave her to her fate were more than just a shot in the dark. A year ago, that thought would not have been allowed to so much as whisper at the edges of her mind. To even think it now left a bitter taste in her mouth. She sighed and shook her head so that her tangled, smoke-scented hair swirled across her shoulders. Piper got out of the car without another word, balancing her basket on her hip and holding her other hand out to Wyatt as he climbed down from the backseat. She had a moment of uncertainty as he realized that she could not rightly call Wyatt to stand by her side when she was going to be standing at the center of a storm, and while Dean was going to be occupied with battles of his own.

In the gulf created by her silence, Wyatt dashed around the car and wound up by Dean's side as he popped the trunk of the car open and began pulling out weaponry. Dean reached out gave Wyatt's hair an absent-minded ruffle. Piper thought that he was paying Wyatt and his guns roughly the same amount of attention, which was to say, still not a whole lot. That could either work in their favor or against it, Piper decided as she paused to watch him. They could not afford to be troubled or off of their games even for a moment, but if there was anyone who could stand to be distracted from the demon, it was Dean. Unfortunately, Piper did not think that he was being distracted by happy thoughts.

Piper called her son back over to her and noted the reluctance with which he came. Wyatt had had a hard year, losing his father so suddenly, and Piper frequently received the impression that he did not fully believe her when she told him that Daddy was dead and gone. He needed a male to look up to. Wyatt liked Henry well enough, but Henry wasn't…

'Henry is not one of us,' Piper's traitor brain supplied before she could stop herself. She had called him family, and she had meant it, but his trips into the shadowy parts of the night were always going to be short ones.

That did not mean that Piper did not wish, and wish badly, that her son would look at Henry the same way that he had been looking at Dean only a few moments before.

Piper did not dare kneel down so that she could be at Wyatt's level, given how her stomach still hurt, so she tilted his face up so that he was meeting her eyes. Lightning crackled across the sky above them without ever releasing the rain. "The very second that the demon shows up," she told in a voice that should have cowed all argument, "I want you to orb yourself to Grandpa and Chris, do you understand? Get yourself to safety."

Should have cowed him, but Wyatt had been born into a family that had never been one to give a damn about 'should have'. "I want to stay and help," Wyatt said. For a few seconds, he looked so determined and so much like his father that it took Piper's breath away, and she was left flailing with no clear idea of how to answer.

Dean saved her. "You should listen to your mother, little man," he said. "You have a good four or five years left before you have to worry about getting down with your bad self." 'It's his bad self that I'm worried about,' Piper thought as Wyatt looked at Dean dubiously. "I'm serious, man. I was ten before my dad sent me out." Wyatt looked only slightly mollified, and Dean met Piper's eyes for a moment as he satisfied himself that he had all the weapons that he would need and slammed the lid down.

Piper was grateful enough to him that she was willing to overlook the swearing, but she still tugged Dean to the side as the three of them opened the gate and walked across the lawn. "I don't want him to go out on his own at any age," she whispered to Dean.

Dean grinned at her as he flicked the safety off of a rifle loaded with what Piper presumed to be rock salt. The spark was gone from it. "That horse is already out of the barn and three states away, don't you think, Piper?" he asked. He hopped over the edge of the foundation and into the manor's basement.

Piper hovered on the edge for a moment as Dean turned around and extended his arms up so that he could help her leap down. Before Dean could touch her, however, her son dashed to her side and took her hand in his own. Blue lights filled her vision, there was a slight tugging sensation in her belly that made her grunt, and when her feet touched the ground again it was in the basement. Wyatt released her and gave Dean a faintly challenging look from beneath his lashes. Piper nearly laughed. Hero worship or not, Wyatt was not willing to set his new responsibilities as the miniature man of the house to the side just yet.

'He's not your new daddy, don't worry,' Piper thought, stifling the urge to run her fingers through Wyatt's hair again. It was already standing up like stalks of wheat from the attention that it had received. 'I don't know what he is, either, but we'll figure it out on the other side.'

Dean slung one of the guns off of his shoulder and cocked it as Piper hurried to the center of the basement and began setting out her crystals, three in all, one quartz and two carnelian, so that they formed a large triangle around herself. At carefully spaced intervals between the crystals went the herbs, lit on fire with Dean's lighter, as Piper noticed for the first time how badly her hands were shaking. Chicory, to obtain requests more easily. Althea and wormwood, to attract benevolent spirits. Blood root, to increase familial ties.

Caraway seeds, to keep Wyatt from harm during whatever happened next.

Rosemary, for remembrance, as Piper felt a tightness in the back of her throat.

A shimmering and a whooshing interrupted Piper as she was only midway through her preparations. She glanced up and saw a rapidly solidifying outline only a few yards away, in the place where Phoebe's punching bag had once hung. The outline filled in slowly, like a picture being colored by a child's restless hand, until it revealed Christy wearing the sneer that had taken a pretty face and then destroyed it. Piper felt her lips thinning. She threw her hands out as Christy wrinkled her lips back from her teeth in a snarl that made her look uncannily like a dog gone rapid. The power that Piper threw forth made Christy gasp and then stagger back for a second or two, only to shake it off and advance again. She was stopped quickly when a tremendous booming sound echoed through the air. Christy shrieked and vanished as the rock salt sprayed her. Dean discharged the spent shell quickly and then brought the gun back up to his shoulder, scanning around the basement for the next appearance.

"Get started," he told Piper.

Piper fished for the prescription tablet, by now quite battered from the back pocket of her jeans, and flipped rapidly through the pages until she found the correct one. Even though the crystals surrounding her were still dormant at the moment, Piper felt more powerful as she knelt among them and pressed Wyatt close against her side. When she reached the spell that she had written out in a shaky hand, the letters jumping wildly every time that the car had struck a bump, she raised her voice towards a shout.

"Seeker of prey," Piper yelled at the top of her lungs. "Come to me so that I may, bringing you within my sight, and create an end this night, to rest all of this I will lay."

The wind did not rise into a frenzy. Further lightning did not crash against the sky. Instead, Piper struggled to take a breath as the air became inexplicably thick, like August on the Mississippi, like trying to draw molasses through a straw. She felt Wyatt drawing closer to her side and reached out to find him trembling but calm. Piper repeated the spell over and over again in her mind, wishing for it to work, _willing_ for it to work, and hoping that she had not let her powers atrophy so badly through disuse that she would not be able to cast anything stronger than a magician's parlor trick.

The way that the air gathered and swelled, the way that it crackled and began to smell like ozone the way that it always had before she and her sisters had blown out a fuse by trying to run three hairdryers at once, told her that this was not one of the things that she needed to worry about. There was a faint pop, and then a figure appeared balanced on the edge of foundation. It was hunched over, knees…Piper fought back a gasp as she realized that Billie's knees were actually bending _backwards_, as if there was a praying mantis perched up there on the cement rather than a girl. Her hair hung forward in front of her face. While Billie raised her hand and flicked it back carelessly, Piper saw that she had blisters running over her face that made Piper's look like nothing more than a breakout of acne, and her eyelids were drooping downwards as if all of the skin was about to slide right off of her skull.

"I think your toy's about to break," Piper called out, but breathlessly. For the first time, she did not refer to the thing in front of her as Billie, not even within her own head.

The thing grinned. Her teeth were slimed over with blood and…something else. Piper preferred not to think about what that something else might actually be. "Won't need it for much longer," it replied. The thing craned its head up to stare at the glittering stars. Piper was almost surprised that its head did not spin all the way around first. "Do you really think that I'm going to stop because there's no roof?" It hopped down from the foundation so lightly that the dust barely stirred beneath its feet as it landed.

"No," Piper said, and bent her. She flipped rapidly through her pages until she found the right one and then began to chant.

"To darkness you belong," she began, struggling to read her own scrawl, "if death will not suffice. To hell I cast you, to the wasteland I forever bind you, by the Power of Three I destroy you." The air all around her was all but rippling. Piper was surprised that her and Wyatt's hair was not standing on end. 'You took my family,' Piper thought as she looked at what was left of Billie's face and then screamed the final line.

---

Dean had felt the air swell and pulse like this before, proof that magic existed even though he would much rather grit his teeth and say otherwise. Usually it ended with Dad, Sam, or himself getting thrown into a few hard services and, worst case scenario, a trip to the emergency room. There were worse scenarios than that running through Dean's mind now.

One shot left in the shotgun. Seven or eight when it got down to the others. Then he got to the blades.

The demon hopped down from the edge of the foundation, said its spiel, and began to stroll forward. Dean would almost believe that it did not know that he was there, were it not for the sideways glance that he saw flicked his way. Oh, it knew, and it knew that he knew, and it wanted him to know that he didn't mean anything to it at all.

'We'll see about that, you bitch,' Dean thought. 'You took my family.' He raised the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

A black swarm filled the air, and Dean heard the buzzing of bees.

---

"By the Power of Three I cast you into the wastelands with this song!" Piper screamed the last line so furiously that she did not even have time to wince as her voice cracked. It was not her best rhyme, certainly, but she thought that she could be forgiven, seeing as she had written in a car and with her mind trying to skip over to eight million other things at once. Anyway, it was not the rhyme that mattered. It was the power that she sent coursing through it.

The crystals flared into life at the same time that Dean treated the thing wearing Billie's face to a chest full of rock salt. It went rolling end over end while Dean threw the gun to the side and grabbed for another. The crystals cast a red glow over Piper's face and body, making her look as if she had been drenched in blood, and briefly illuminated what she thought was a swarm of bees. They were gone before she could be sure. She stared down at her hands, looking so much like those of Lady Macbeth, before she looked up at the crystals again. Three of them carefully chosen so that they would amplify her power, create three witches out of one. It was the best that she could do on such short notice.

It was not nearly enough.

As Piper watched, slack-jawed in horror, Billie did not rise again. Dean did.

---

It was like breathing bees, Dean thought crazily, or being underwater. He could not pull a breath, or move, or jerk away and fight. A marionette with its strings broken would have had more agency.

'What the fuck?' Dean thought, half-panicked, struggling to lift his arms or blink the eyes that no longer belonged to him. 'What is this?'

'I told you that I would not forget you, Dean,' a voice that was neither male nor female, silken and high-pitched, whispered from a place that still sounded as if it was directly behind his ear even though he knew this to be impossible. 'Didn't I tell you that I would make you pay? The check just arrived at your table.'

'Bite me.' It might lack in a certain amount of wit, but Dean thought that he was doing damned well when it came to raw sentiment. He stared out through his own eyes as the demon blinked once, twice, and then focused upon the smoldering hunk of flesh that had once been a blonde co-ed. 'I swear to God, I will be the one that kills you-' Even now, revenge was the strongest thought in his mind.

'It's like watching a monkey run into a glass wall.' The demon actually had the gall to sound _amused_, and Dean's fury grew tenfold.

Wyatt dashed out of the protective circle formed by Piper and her crystals. The demon tracked him like a cat finally spotting the mouse.

Revenge seemed like such a small, petty thing, after all.

---

Dean's eyes were a beautiful, mossy green that could either gleam with self-satisfaction or turn stormy with fury. When he turned to face Piper again, they shone with the golden-red of a new flame.

"Orb out of here," Piper whispered to Wyatt. "_Now_." He stared at her and then shook his head once, mutely. "Goddamnit, Wyatt," Piper began, nearly crying, and then pounded her first against the cement in frustration. She reached for Wyatt with a mind to bodily pick him up and throw him over the wall and to safety. He darted out of her reach.

"I want to help!" Wyatt insisted, and nearly stamped his foot. As much as Piper wanted to shake him for choosing the worst of all possible moments in which to turn defiant, it was much worse than that. He had stepped outside of the protective triangle that she had set up, and the demon had noticed.

Piper half-rose to her feet, intending to dash out after him, before she caught herself and said the spell again, and then again with the result was no better than the first attempt. She slammed her fist against the cement again when the crystals only flared weakly, light bulbs at the end of their lives. "Where are you?" Piper screamed at the surrounding walls. Her words were echoed back to her without response. Something inside of Piper broke and sent her lunging out from under protection herself, heading straight for Wyatt. She could still toss him over the edge of the foundation, still get him to safety even if she could not banish the demon where it belonged.

Piper reached her son at the same time that the demon did, felt her fingers brush against the back of his shirt. Just as she had not been able to stop herself from referring to the demon as Billie while it was in her form, neither could she now stop herself from referring to it as Dean, even with those glowing eyes. He drew his fist back and then brought it forward again and into her jaw with a strength that went far beyond the merely human. Piper's head snapped back to the point of breaking as she collapsed heavily onto the cement. Her ears rang and she did not think that she could even move her limbs, let alone stand and fight again.

Piper repeated the spell over and over again on endless loop into the dust, watching it puff up with each breath.

---

Dean felt his knuckles colliding with Piper's jaw, but from far away, as if the sensation was having to be telegraphed to him. 'NO!'

'Little late for protests, don't you think?' Oh, that son of a bitch was lucky that it did not have a neck to call its very own for Dean to wrap his hands around. There would be nothing left but pulp by the time that he was done. 'And you were the one who left that door open for me to come in. Won't that be a fun detail to think about, until I'm done with you. You're young and strong, Dean. I see our relationship lasting for a good long while.' While Piper rolled end over end across the cement and struggled to get her bearings back, the demon commanded Dean to grab Wyatt by the front of his shirt and lift him, screaming, into the air.

Dean, Sam, Wyatt, Chris. Hundreds of others, thousands, laid down on a pyre to power. Dean's flash of rage was so great that it could have powered the sun, and it felt as if it was pushing outwards, stretching the bounds of a body not nearly large enough to hold it. It certainly consumed all of his attention again, so that he hardly even noticed when the fingers uncurled to let Wyatt fall back down to the cement, or that it was he who had ordered the movement.

One more time, Dean's ears were filled with the buzzing of bees.

---

Piper's head was ringing with the force of a truly world-class hangover. So long as her thoughts were clearing again, finally, she would grateful for every single ache. "By the Power of Three," she whispered against the cement and, pushing herself up onto her hands and knees, said the spell again. Lightning crisscrossed the sky, dogs all over the neighborhood were howling and worse, cats were actually _screaming_, as her spell did absolutely nothing at all. If she slammed her hand into the basement floor again, she was going to break her knuckles.

Dean dropped Wyatt abruptly and arched his back, as a man would shortly before being sick. A dark cloud swarmed around his head.

Piper hardly noticed. She raised her head and screamed towards the sky, "You'll show yourselves to him, but not to me? I'm your _sister_!" The only sound that came back to her was that of her own ragged breathing. In a lower voice, nearly a whisper, as her throat felt so ragged and cracked that she hardly thought she could manage anything else, Piper finished, "I need you."

No response. Piper whispered the spell again. She and Dean, peas in a pod, two moths diving headlong into a flame. Neither one of them knew when to quit. Had they met under different circumstances, Piper thought that the two of them could have liked each other a lot.

At Piper's third repetition of the spell, the crystals stopped glowing the sullen red color of dying roses. They _exploded_, so suddenly and so violently that Piper had to throw her arm over her face to keep herself from being blinded. She looked back up and discovered that the bloody glow from the crystals had not subsided. It was swirling in a circle around them, faster and faster, until Piper could see nothing outside of the light. She _felt_, though, felt fingers tracing over the tattoo at her wrist, the one that was like Phoebe's many, felt fingers plucking at her blouse and could almost hear Paige mocking her for her lack of fashion. The Power of Three. Piper could have cried.

Then she _did_ burst into tears, suddenly, as she felt a third set of hands beginning to comb through Piper's hair, separating the tangles that she hadn't bothered to deal with. She had always been a little jealous of Piper's hair, of the way that Piper had been able to grow it so long and so thick, and so had spent hours brushing and braiding it when they were children. Piper had been her very favorite doll.

"_Prue_?" Piper gasped, her voice choked with disbelief.

The glow expanded outwards from the protective circle until it was touching the walls of the basement themselves and, when it could find no further room to expand horizontally, lashed upwards in a bloody-colored explosion that would have all of her neighbors dialing 911 within moments. It made her skin itch, made her eyes burn, and forced her to look down. When Piper raised her eyes again, the glow was gone. So, so far as she could tell, were her sisters. Piper took a shuddering breath and pushed herself back up to her feet.

Dean was sinking slowly down to the floor, looking dazed. Piper wondered if the magic had felt the same as it washed over him as it had when it touched her. He nodded towards the blackened corpse only a few yards away from them both, so charred that it hardly looked human. Falling into two fires in the span of a day had a way of doing that. "What did you do?" he asked.

"Couldn't kill the thing," Piper said. Dean's flinch was barely perceptible, but Piper put her hand on his arm where she had before and again found that she was not shrugged away. "So I sent it to where all of the bad demons go when they're vanquished. See if it manages to get out of there before we see a new millennium or three."

Dean nodded and then nudged at Billie's body with his foot. "If it makes you feel any better," he said, "demons are attracted to people in emotional turmoil." His mouth twisted for a moment before he went on. "In order for her to attract something that big, she had to have been pretty torn up inside."

Where Dean had only nudged at Billie's body, it was still all that Piper could do not to kick it into ashes. "It doesn't," she said tightly. "But thank you." She turned her face into Dean's shoulder, her cheeks wet with tears. So, she realized a moment later, were his.

End Part Eleven


	12. Chapter 12

Epilogue

Piper had never dealt with a ghost like this before. Granted, the ghosts that she had experience with tended to be friendly, and the hostile ones few and far between. She was willing in this case to bow to the expert.

Her stomach still itched from where she had been forced to tolerate the stitches until a doctor could pull them out, in order to avoid any more red flags, but she insisted on taking her turn with the shovel. Dean made a few cursory protests by way of chivalry that fooled nobody; Piper thought that he was glad to turn it over. They all took their turns unearthing Christy's body, even Wyatt. Even, to Piper's surprise, Victor. Christy might have been buried as a Jane Doe, but a locator spell was an easy thing to perform now that she had her magic again.

"Is that all?" Piper asked as she watched the flames lick upwards. Somewhere far away, she thought that she heard Christy screaming in impotent rage. It was gone too soon for her to be sure.

"That's all," Dean said as he gathered up the supplies so that he could take them back to his trunk. He was wearing his leather jacket, even though the day was sweltering. Piper thought that he was more interested in the armor. "Did you watch what I was doing?" he asked, giving her a sideways glance, as if he was not sure how his question was going to be received.

"I did," Piper confirmed. "But I'm not going to need it. Not for my sisters, anyway."

Dean looked dubious until Piper said the word 'sisters'. "I'm sure that you'll find a use for it somewhere," he said, and flashed her that cocky grin again. Either he had become a much better liar over the past few weeks, or he even meant that one. "Since you're coming out of retirement and all."

That issue was still so large and looming that Piper was not sure that she could face it head-on quite yet. "When are you leaving?" she asked instead.

"As soon as this dies down." Dean nodded towards Christy's merrily burning grave. Chris and Wyatt were running around, collecting leaves that they could throw into the flames. Theirs was a strange family. "I have the mistaken identity situation to sort out, jobs waiting for me, that kind of thing."

"Oh." Piper had not expected that he would stay, but she felt oddly deflated to hear it from Dean's own lips. She considered for a moment before she gathered her nerve, raised herself onto her toes, and kissed Dean, very softly, on the mouth. His eyes alone when she pulled away made it worth it. "Feel free to come around any time," she said.

"I'll do that," Dean replied. She could feel him watching her as she walked away.

Victor had both of her boys by the hands. Chris and Wyatt were wearing guilty expressions, and Wyatt was sucking on a singed thumb. He gave Piper a big, sunny grin when he realized that he was caught. "Thought I would take the boys for the rest of the afternoon," Victor said, "in case you wanted to be alone."

"Thank you," Piper told him, smiling. She would not precisely be alone.

---

Dean heard his cellular phone beginning to ring in his jacket pocket almost as soon as Piper turned her back. He pulled it out and could not contain the roll of his eyes or the slight smile on the corners of his mouth as he saw who it was. "Yes?" he asked after he had flipped the phone open and raised it to his ear.

"Boy, don't you go getting that kind of attitude with me," a familiar voice said. "You were the one thinking about calling me, not the other way around."

"It's done," Dean told her.

"You all right?" Missouri asked him, her voice softer and more concerned than Dean thought he had ever heard before, even on the day that he had showed up on her doorstep as a newly made orphan.

"Yeah." Dean cleared his throat to get rid of the lump in it before he could continue. "Yeah. I'll be okay. I just wanted to know if you could, uh, tell me about Dad. Not for a job or anything, just…" He trailed off for a moment as the lump back and refused to be ignored. "What he was like, you know, when he was first starting out."

"Sure thing, sugar," Missouri said. She waited a beat for him to get himself together, and then she began to speak.

---

A few hours later, Piper climbed down into the basement of her family home, sitting in the center of the floor and feeling the sun as it warmed her face and hair. She had begun to look at architects over the past few weeks, so that they could begin to rebuild. It would not be exactly like it was before-it could not be-but it could still be something good.

Piper had watched carefully while Dean had sent Christy on to the afterlife that she so desperately deserved. She knew that she would have to do the same for her own siblings, eventually, so that they could rest. Not today, though. For now, it was very good to drag her new Book of Shadows into her lap, write down all that she had seen, and feel her sisters' presences in the air around her.

End


End file.
